Writing design

Stephen B. Heard on The Scientist’s Writing Guide

In his book, A scientist’s guide to writing, Stephen Heard draws on his own experience as a scientist, graduate advisor and editor, emphasizing that the goal of all scientific writing should be absolute clarity; that good writing requires deliberate practice; and that what many scientists need are not long lists of prescriptive rules, but rather direct engagement with their behaviors and attitudes when they write. It combines advice on topics such as how to generate and maintain writing momentum with practical advice on structuring a scientific paper, revising a first draft, managing citations, responding to peer reviews, management of co-authors, etc.


What do you think is the big idea the book tries to address?

SH: Well, the big idea he tackles is simple: that scientific writing is difficult for almost everyone, but with a little help it can get easier! I know that for me, as an early career scientist, my whole outlook changed when I realized that writing was a skill I could practice and develop, not just something I sat down and did. at the end of an experiment. The scientific guide to writing distills a lot of what I’ve learned about myself and other science writers over the years.

Digging a little deeper, I think there are two main themes in the book.

The first is that the most important thing we try to achieve in our writing is clarity. As science writers, we’re not always very good at it, so I devote a lot of content to ways to achieve clearer writing: describing, for example, and working with the conventions that readers expect in the structure and format of the scientific article. I hope anyone who reads the book ends up with a toolkit that they can apply to their writing at all scales, from word choice to the structure of an entire article.

The second theme is that writers can benefit from conscious reflection on their own behavior when writing. We know a lot about human psychology, and that knowledge gives us tools to write faster and more efficiently (don’t we all love that?). Things like procrastination, perfectionism, writer’s block – these are at least as important to science writers as our treatment of detail in a Methods section. Probably more important! I know I’m my worst enemy when I sit down to write, but over the years I’ve learned ways to manage my own behavior and they help me A LOT. I think a lot of other writers are like me.

Some might expect a book about writing to be dry and boring. How did you avoid this?

SH: Well, they can be! But I worked very hard to make The scientist’s guide engaging, and hopefully even entertaining. It is true that the thematic sentences, sentence structure and the distinction between “reject” and “reject but resubmit” could be rather dry. But I think writing can also be fascinating. Just as an example, there is a rather strange history behind the use of active versus passive voice in scientific writing with over 350 years of surprising twists. Plus, I was able to sneak into the California Condors, the only Grammy Award for “Best Disco Song,” and a bunch of other fun stuff. I love when people tell me they enjoyed reading the book.

Why was it time for a second edition?

SH: I was bored? No I’m kidding! The first edition is holding up very well, I think, but I’ve seen opportunities to make it even more useful. There are many additions, but I will mention three in particular. First, there’s a new chapter on reading. We can’t write about science without reading about it, and managing the sheer flood of new papers being published in all fields is a huge challenge. I’ve written about ‘reference reading’, ‘survey reading’, and ‘in-depth reading’ strategies, and I think they offer real help. Second, there’s a new chapter on where to publish – on choosing among journals when it’s time to submit an article, and on preprint. I think it’s a subject that a lot of people at the start of their careers would like to see demystified. Finally, I more than doubled the number of end-of-chapter exercises. People tell me that they have found them very useful in teaching (I use them in my own science writing class!), but also that they have used them to work on the book on their own. Of course, there are also tons of little additions. I hope that if you liked the first edition, you will like the second.

How do you see the book helping people mentor and teach writing?

SH: What’s interesting about this question is that I was really, pleasantly surprised at how creative people were. When I started writing the 1st edition, almost 10 years ago my mental image was, boringly, of an early career scientist buying the book and reading it. And of course, an instructor can adopt the book as the text for an undergraduate or graduate course in scientific writing – I very often hear from colleagues who use the book in this way. (All my own course materials are available here, by the way). But there are other, more imaginative uses of the book that people have told me about. Some of my colleagues buy a copy of the book for each new student who joins their lab. Others “adopt” the book for the lab and read it together at a lab meeting, covering a few chapters each week, with different students presenting each time. A few people “live-tweeted” their reading of the book, sharing their favorite insights on social media.

And if I were allowed to think a little more outside the box, why couldn’t a department adopt the book (or another writing notebook, of course!), not for an individual course, but for a major? Students would retain the book and refer to it throughout their course of study, giving the program a cohesive approach to teaching writing and an opportunity for each course to reinforce the last. I think our curricula would benefit from us doing this with writing, statistics, and probably a few other things, but I’m not sure the academic curriculum design world is quite ready for my ideas!

What’s the most satisfying thing about writing a book like this?

SH: From a distance: see a dog-eared copy in the wild! Sometimes someone will ask me to sign a copy, and they’ll apologize that the corners are worn and there are post-its strewn everywhere. But it’s just wonderful – it means they went back to the book again and again and found ideas that helped them. Every time someone tells me that the book has helped them write easier, or faster, or better, my day is definitely made!


Stephen B. Heard is a professor of biology at the University of New Brunswick in Canada and associate editor of the journal American naturalist.