One of the biggest challenges in research is writing.
Science (say math, or physics, or programming) has a sufficiently unambiguous syntax and language that students are trained to read and learn from it. In this I refer to the syntax of “1 + 2”. Unfortunately, the quality of english writing classes is hugely variable, and is a major stumbling block for many students.
For instance, I have been reviewing lots of student papers and grant proposals this semester, and see the same basic flaws over and over again. Although the ideas are great, and in some cases the author has done very impressive past work, the writing is sufficiently poor that I cannot give it a positive review.
What most frustrated me during the PhD is that it was never really clear what ‘poor writing’ meant. Sure, there were seemingly universal rules such as ‘the passive voice should not be used’ – guides such as the Chicago manual and Elements of Style are full of rules. But where do they come from? Further, when people would say ‘make the text flow better’ or ‘connect these thoughts’, what does that mean? I slowly learned through osmosis, but that’s not a winning solution.
The purpose of writing is to communicate to the reader. Since both writing and reading are lossy processes, we want to write in a way that is unambiguous, easy to read, and convincing.
Based on these principles, the following is a series of short articles to hopefully help improve your writing. Articles will be added throughout 2020.
Some good resources include: