Writer’s Workshop

Pamela J. Hines

Senior Editor

Science

@Pam_Hines

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Consider your audiences Editors Referees Expert readers Non-specialist readers

Publishing your research

SCIENCE looks forOutliersClosersLeaders

And rejects Incremental advancesUnconvincing conclusions

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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

The Lessons of Failure, by Brian Ray, U. NebraskaYou 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/

“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?”

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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

http://www.thereviewreview.net/publishing-tips/what-editors-want-must-read-writers-submitti

Editors

The editor is tired and busy.

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.

8 http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2011/09/19/have-journal-editors-become-anachronisms/

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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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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Why Academics Stink at WritingThe Chronicle of Higher Education

October 3, 2014, Steven Pinker

Metadiscourse

Professional narcissism

Apologizing

Shudder quotes

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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Language Crimes: A Lesson in How Not to Write, Courtesy of the Professoriate The Wall Street Journal, February 5, 1999

Denis Dutton

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. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denis_Dutton

http://denisdutton.com/language_crimes.htm

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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/2013/06/24/a-note-to-beginning-science-writers/

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“Part of the art of any kind of total scholarship is to say it well.”-- Stephen Jay Gould, Past AAAS President

Training:Santa Fe Science Writing Workshop

AAAS Mass Media Fellowship

AAAS Communication Workshops

Communicate about your research

Audiences:The people you go to conferences with

The people who fund your research

The people you meet while traveling

Settings:The scientific paper

An entertaining dinner-lecture

The elevator speech

Gail Shumway/Getty Images

How Stuff Works

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“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.

Authors

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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.

Authors

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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.

EditageInsights Feb 7, 2015 http://www.editage.com/insights/authors-or-journal-editors-who-faces-more-pressure-in-the-academic-publishing-system

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.

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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.

Experiment with new technologies.

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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/how-wolves-change-rivers-the-complexity-of-ecosystems/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+ScholarlyKitchen+%28The+Scholarly+Kitchen%29