Writer’s Workshop
Pamela J. Hines
Senior Editor
Science
@Pam_Hines
Publishing your research
Consider your audiences
 Editors
 Referees
 Expert readers
 Non-specialist readers
SCIENCE looks for
 Outliers
 Closers
 Leaders
And rejects
 Incremental advances
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 Unconvincing conclusions
Referees
 Who are they?
 What are their responsibilities?
 What do they get for helping you?
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The ideal referee
Qualified
Objective
Constructive
Courteous
Careful
Prompt
Confidential
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We ask the referees:
 What have we learned from this paper?
 How important is it?
 How well do the observations support the interpretation?
 Consider bias, value, clarity, routes forward.
And then there is:
Cross-review
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Dealing with Rejection
“Failures are far from a total loss.”
‘Your work is meant to be shared.”
“Some ideas need time to marinate, some
spoil, and some aren’t that great to begin with.”
“The best way to figure out how to write well and get published is to do it
for real, which requires sending things off and getting rejected”
“What remains is the advice—admittedly worded sometimes in ways that
hurt. But so what?”
The Lessons of Failure, by Brian Ray, U. Nebraska
You may learn more from your rejection letters than from your acceptances
Chronicle of Higher Education, 7Jan2015, http://chronicle.com/article/The-Lessons-of-Failure/150967/
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http://www.thereviewreview.net
/publishing-tips/what-editorswant-must-read-writers-submitti
Editors
The editor wants nothing more than to read
something so fresh and powerful and
polished there is no question it must be in
the journal.
A magazine editor is a person who
enjoys bringing new writing to the
world in a publication
that will be seen, read, appreciated,
and talked about.
The editor is tired and busy.
Much of the editor’s work is invisible. . . . One pleasure is
sending out the acceptances, and knowing somebody is
made happy. At the same time, the editor sends out
flotillas of form rejections. This is a job to delegate, if
possible, it’s so depressing
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Editors
the first step in addressing hyperinformation is to stop
thinking of it as receiver problem but as a market
problem in which authors compete for the limited
attention of readers.
If we view journals as mediators of quality signals in a
crowded information space — a space that is getting
a little more crowded each year — the future of the
journal presents many more opportunities than when
it is seen as a mechanism to control the distribution of
scientific research.
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http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2011/09/19/have-journal-editors-become-anachronisms/
Stylish academic writers . . . deploy
specialized language gracefully,
cautiously, and meticulously, taking
care to keep their readers on board.
- Helen Sword, 3June2012, Chronicle of Higher
Education
Attractive writing – brave, personal,
narrative, zingy, imaginative, funny –
will not make you appear any less
smart.
- Rachel Toor, 2July2012, Chronicle of Higher
Education
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Metadiscourse
Professional narcissism
Why Academics Stink at Writing
Apologizing
The Chronicle of Higher Education
Shudder quotes
October 3, 2014, Steven Pinker
Hedging
Metaconcepts and nominalizations
The curse of knowledge
Few incentives for writing well
The amount of abstraction a writer
can get away with depends on the
expertise of his readership.
In writing badly, we are wasting each
other’s time, sowing confusion and
error, and turning our profession into
a laughingstock.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Pinker
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The vatic tone and phony
technicality can also serve to elevate
a trivial subject.
[The] sentence beats readers into
submission and instructs them that
they are in the presence of a great
and deep mind. Actual
communication has nothing to do
with it.
(. . . ) when Kant or Aristotle or
Wittgenstein are most obscure, it’s
because they are honestly grappling
with the most complex and difficult
problems the human mind can
encounter. How different from the
desperate incantations of the Bad
Writing Contest winners, who hope
to persuade their readers not by
argument but by obscurity that they
too are the great minds of the age.
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Language Crimes: A
Lesson in How Not to
Write, Courtesy of the
Professoriate
The Wall Street Journal,
February 5, 1999
Denis Dutton
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denis_Dutton
http://denisdutton.com/language_crimes.htm
Carl Zimmer on
advice to aspiring
science writers:
“How do I start writing
about science?”
The answer is you
start writing.
http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2013/06/2
4/a-note-to-beginning-science-writers/
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Communicate about your research
“Part of the art of
any kind of total
scholarship is to
say it well.”
-- Stephen Jay Gould,
Past AAAS President
Settings:
The scientific paper
An entertaining dinner-lecture
The elevator speech
Audiences:
The people you go to conferences with
The people who fund your research
The people you meet while traveling
Training:
Santa Fe Science Writing Workshop
AAAS Mass Media Fellowship
Gail Shumway/Getty Images
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How Stuff Works
AAAS Communication Workshops
Authors
“Clearly.”
Sentences too long.
Weak referents (“it seemed as if”).
Excess words, redundancy (“extremely quiet”).
Unquantifiable modifiers, attributes in the eye of the beholder (“strongly, most”).
Claims to fame (‘important, novel, significant”).
ADMC (Acronyms Drive Me Crazy).
Chronological lab reports.
The kitchen sink.
Neologisms.
Poor logic.
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Authors
Compact, compelling prose.
Rich but not weird vocabulary.
Make every item pull its weight.
Compact and energized sentences.
Each sentence picks up from the preceding one.
Put the least amount of data in to make the story convincing.
Thoughts built as stepping stones, no bridges, no Spiderman-worthy leaps.
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Authors or journal editors: Who faces more
pressure in the academic publishing system?
Ethical issues: add citations
to papers from their journal to
boost the journal’s impact
factor. include citations of the
work of the editor(s).
Turnaround time: Too slow to
respond to authors’ queries
and convey decisions, failure
to speed up the publication
process.
Unprofessionalism:. used
“scientifically incorrect”
reviewer comments; asked
authors to respond to
completely contrasting reviews
without offering help.
Irrational decision-making:
reject papers without
satisfactory explanation or with
positive reviews.
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Respect for the authors:
understand the impact of
decisions; mentor early
career researchers
Responsibility to the
journal: keep it successful.
Editors want: the best
research papers.
Editors get: inexperienced
authors, preliminary work,
scientists who need
coaching.
Time: not enough of it.
Altruistic motivations: I fly
in coach.
EditageInsights Feb 7,
2015
http://www.editage.com/insights/
authors-or-journal-editors-whofaces-more-pressure-in-theacademic-publishing-system
http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2014/10/21/updated-80-things-publishers-do-2014-edition/
Audience/field detection and cultivation.
Plan and create strategies for the future.
Establish, cultivate, and maintain a good reputation.
Recruitment and retention of editors and reviewers.
Dealing with authorship problems – fraud, disputes.
Integrate and track metrics.
Media relations and publicity.
Depositing content and data.
Managing, archiving, and protecting records.
Work on general access and fairness issues.
Create or integrate with educational offerings.
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Experiment with new technologies.
Metrics & statistics
Impact factor
– judges the journal
Altmetrics
– judges the paper
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How Wolves Changed
Yellowstone
The ecosystem of publishing
http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2015/01/16/howwolves-change-rivers-the-complexity-ofecosystems/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_mediu
m=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+ScholarlyKitc
hen+%28The+Scholarly+Kitchen%29
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