Write Better Scientific Papers by Understanding Your Readers' Thoughts
Convey your stories better and make people understand
As a scientist you often research for years without publishing anything. Eventually, you decide that it is time to share what you’ve learned. You are faced with the seemingly impossible challenge to put this jungle of lessons onto a piece of paper.
However, is there a way to make the process of scientific writing easier? Is there a recipe to simplify and improve your writing?
In this article, I will share a few methods to structure your writing on three levels. We start with thinking about your key messages and building the story. On the next level we use paragraphs to convey your main arguments. Your sentences, finally, ensure that your reader thinks about the right things at the right time.
As a result your readers will understand your story simpler and faster. And you will have a better and painless experience bringing your messages onto paper and out into the world.
I would like to point out that a majority of the following methods is inspired by the great scientific writing workshop from the published authors and well known editors Mark Buchanan and Justin Mullins.
The story & structure of your paper
Before writing anything you decide which main points your paper should convey. Often this is a specific method you developed or an important realization you made. Find two or three points that you want your reader to take away from reading your paper. Your paper should be optimised solely on burning these points in your reader’s brain.
Find a story that guides the unknowing reader to understanding your main points. Try hard not to loose your reader during the story. For example, you should not scare off the reader by presuming an advanced expert knowledge or constantly jumping from one scene to another. Your story should start on a basic level. From there it should take a clear path of equally sized steps towards the goal of your paper. Make your reader understand your main points.
You outline the story with topic sentences that carry your guiding statements. These will be used as a starting point to writing the paper. Additionally, these statements will guide the reader through your paper. The statements should provide the reader the whole picture. However, these do not necessarily have to cover the technical details of your work. This story in scientific writing mainly consists of four parts. Introduction, Methods, Results and Conclusion.
The topic sentence & structure of your paragraphs
Your paper is divided into multiple paragraphs with one specific point each. This helps the reader to understand your text step by step. Additionally, this provides a logical structure which prevents the reader from getting lost. Each of your main points gets its dedicated space to unfold.
Each paragraph starts with a topic sentence featuring a guiding statement of your story. This sentence should include the argument that the paragraph is going to make. This helps the reader to understand what he or she can expect from the paragraph. The brain already knows what statement it is expected to understand now. It knows what to look for, namely, the answer to the following question. Why is the topic sentence true?
The rest of the paragraph serves as the explanation and discussion of the topic sentence. The expectations of the topic sentence should be fulfilled now. Here is where you put your references as premisses and you should discuss the nasty details of your statements. You know in which state the reader is when reading the second part of the paragraph. The reader wants to know why he or she should believe the statement that you made.
You build your paragraphs like that because it helps the reader to understand your story. It helps to understand the main points that you want to make. Every human has a slow and a fast working brain. The reader can use his or her fast working brain if you build a clear path and it is not confused by any disruptions. These disruptions would for example be answers to questions that the reader does not have. To avoid that we later present a strategy to understand and control the reader’s state of mind.
Sentences to control your reader’s thoughts
The first draft of your paper just features your topic sentences. By dumping these into your manuscript you outline the story of your paper. Here, you can shift things around and try different angles to your story. However, you should not yet focus on the beauty of sentences or irrelevant things like grammar. The purpose of your first draft is to get a feeling for your story and above all, see if it also works on paper. Occasionally, you can make notes for the broad content of each of your paragraphs. But don’t get stuck.
As a next step you add all important content to your paragraphs. Thereafter, each paragraph should contain the required information to believe your respective topic sentence. You don’t have to connect the information yet. You don’t even have to write good sentences. Just put everything in place for now. I call this the final research phase of writing your paper. If you are lacking proof for some arguments, now is the time to do the hard work. Find and record it.
We shortly interrupt the program for some insights into sentences. Please enjoy. We’ll be back to the writing process any minute.
The purpose of a sentence is to convey a thought. To be precise, ideally one complete unit of thought. What does that mean? A sentence always carries some copy of the author’s thought. We call this thought complete if it can be understood without additional context. Additionally, we call it a unit if we can not further divide it into multiple complete ones. In other words, a sentence should transfer the smallest sensible version of one thought from the author to the reader. A single sentence should never try to transfer an incomplete thought or multiple thoughts at once. The message would not arrive as intended.
To understand a thought, the reader has to know what it is about. If you conversationally explain a concept you can easily check if your opposite knows what you think about. If you think about two different things, your fellow man will not understand your thought. In that case you usually clear up any confusion by restating what you talk about. However, you can not clear up any confusion in a written sentence. Therefore you have to make sure that the reader thinks about the right thing when reading your sentence.
You can control what the reader thinks about by using easy active sentences. The basic structure of such a sentence contains three parts. An actor (subject), the action (verb) and the receiver (object). A reader will always think about the actor of a sentence. Therefore, make yourself clear what the reader should think about and use it as the actor. By changing the actor in consecutive sentences you can shift the reader’s attention. Doing this rigorously is the only way to safely transfer an exact copy of your thought to the reader.
Your reader understands thoughts only one after another. That’s because we, humans, mainly use our slow working brain to understand new concepts. And the slow brain works in series. Therefore the reader can not understand multiple new concepts simultaneously. Although often multiple thoughts are interlinked you have to explain them one after another. You have to arrange the respective thoughts in series, not in parallel. If you arrange them in parallel, the reader will discard one of the thoughts or even worse, both.
Your reader can only process a thought with 7 chunks of information or less. As an example, try to remember the following list of random digits: 3141592|839. It will get hard after the line, i.e., by the length of 7. Here, one number corresponds to one chunk of information. The same applies for conveying thoughts. A thought with more than 7 chunks is extremely hard to understand. The reader will forget the beginning of the sentence or thought before arriving at its end.
It depends on the reader’s previous knowledge what is processed as one chunk of information. One chunk is not always exactly one word or digit. For example, a math nerd might know the number pi=3.141592. For this person, the above list of 10 digits would consist of only 4 instead of 10 chunks. This person could easily remember the list. You always have to be aware of your reader’s knowledge and adapt your sentences. This guarantees that the reader can process your sentences and follow your thoughts.
You can convey complex thoughts by using the recoding method. A complex thought is one that exceeds the limit of 7 chunks of information. It can not be explained in a single sentence. However, you can prepare the reader to receive such a complex thought. You just divide it into multiple smaller thoughts that each convey a subset of the required chunks. By thoroughly explaining such a smaller thought the reader can access it as a single chunk in the future. In other words, the multiple chunks from the smaller thought are recoded into a single chunk. Now you can use the single chunks to convey the complex thought in a single sentence.
Now back to our program about the writing process. Let's finish up.
The penultimate step of writing your paper is to edit your paragraphs according to the laws of sentences. Be aware of the paragraph’s general structure. It features a topic sentence and a collection of sentences which make the reader believe the topic sentence. Your task is now to find a good series of sentences that convey the required thoughts to your reader. Take your time for this process. At the end, your reader should be able to understand each paragraph without having to read it multiple times.
A good paper basically applies the recoding method to educate the reader step by step. The first level (sentences) recodes known words into thoughts and new concepts. The second level (paragraphs) recodes multiple concepts into single statements, the topic sentences. The last level (full paper) uses to story to recode the topic sentences into the one message of your paper. A good paper succeeds on each of these recoding levels.
Iterative editing makes your work shine
The final step is to frequently edit your paper on each level (sentences, paragraphs, story) and improve it bit by bit. This step is what makes great writing. As Mark Buchanan, one of the supervisors of the scientific writing workshop said: „Through an iterative editing process your writing becomes better than yourself.“ That being said, the first versions of your paper don’t have to be glorious. Just start and improve afterwards. Remove the whiteness of the paper before your spelling mistakes ;)
If you want to learn more, give these guys a shot and consider booking their workshop for you and your team. They provide many more details, examples, exercises and even feedback on your writing. Have a look.
If you enjoyed this piece and could learn something you may also like my future articles on scientific working and reflections on that. Feel free to follow and join me on the journey. It would mean the world to me (smile).
