This is the second research Pro-Tip of the summer, talking about how to approach the monumental task of writing your results up in a report. Specifically, we're talking about publication of a Research Note of the American Astronomical Society, which is a little less monstrous than a refereed scientific paper, but a lot of the same concepts apply.
Not sure how to get started on that paper/article/research note? Have no fear! Today I want to give you some tips on how to get started with writing.
Scientific writing tends to be a bit more dense than creative writing and a bit closer to journalism-type writing. There’s no right way or wrong way to write scientifically, which can make starting quite difficult and nebulous. The first tip I’ll give is to start by reading other papers similar to those you might anticipate writing. If these were long-format journal articles, I’d point you to the papers you’ve been reading as references to understand paper structure, the types of calculations that are discussed, and what’s left out of the discussion. In the case of research notes, it’s more useful to have example research notes than complete papers, so below is a list of some research notes published in the last year (**the first two were works published by Aimee Schechter and Laney Wicker, two recent UT undergraduates!).
Schechter & Casey (2018)**
Wicker & Casey (2019)**
Abramson (2018)
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2515-5172/aada8b
Zink et al. (2019)
Pasham & Wevers (2019)
Dingler & Cuntz (2019)
Konar & Chahal (2019)
Beichman et al. (2019)
I encourage you to READ them. This doesn’t mean you’ll understand every concept presented in each note because 1000 words isn’t a lot of room to explain your whole field. Instead, as you read, try to diagram the similarities and differences between these articles. Do they all start out in a similar way with a broad statement about their area of research? What might that statement look like for the research you’ve been doing? Take a stab at jotting down a few ideas even if you don’t know if you have it exactly right. Try to go through the entire note while noticing the pattern of presenting data, describing a figure, and then drawing conclusions. Are there key phrases that are used by many of the notes above? In what ways was the structure of these notes similar? Did any of the differences surprise you? The key to success with scientific writing is to emulate others until you get the hang of it yourself (often this takes years and years!).
Next, I’d encourage you to keep in mind: perfect is the enemy of good. A lot of students struggle to put pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard) for fear that what they write won’t be correct and will need to be re-written. That is not only a super common feeling, but one that doesn’t really go away even after you’ve been doing this for years! But sitting in that fear is not what will get the job done. In order to practice writing, I encourage you to each take a period of the day (maybe 30 minutes this week, ramping up to 1 hour next week) to free-associate about your work. This means keeping your fingers moving on the keyboard, writing out sentences, no matter what — even if what you have to say isn’t perfectly worded, grammatically correct, or eloquent. You're just putting words on the page. Revising a paper or research note with existing text is SO MUCH easier than working with a blank page. Just. Keep. Writing.
Once you have words on a page — celebrate!! And then send them to your advisor. Even if you’d feel embarrassed to do so! I promise they do not have to be perfect for them to read it over. It’s not a book report where you’ll be graded on quality. Your supervisor will just be thrilled that you wrote stuff down, and they will be extremely helpful in the revision process, helping you cite relevant papers, helping with the logical flow, etc. Often they don’t know how to help you best until there’s a working draft in-hand, which can often lead to more fruitful discoveries in the revision process, but that crucial first step belongs to you!
Last thing I’ll mention today is the mechanics of writing a research note. If you visit the submission info page here:
You’ll see that you can submit research notes either as Microsoft Word documents or in LaTeX (or Overleaf which is a form of LaTeX). What’s LaTeX?! It’s the word processor of choice for astronomers (and physicists), which is more like coding up a PDF document than designing it in a fancy graphical user interface. Working in LaTeX can be intimidating, but if you’re eager to learn how it works I’d like to point you to some tutorials:
And here’s a link to overleaf, which is how lots of papers and notes are written these days, online, so you don’t have to bother with installing everything on your local machine:
You can prepare your research note in Word, LaTeX or Overleaf, but I would encourage you to talk to your advisor first it before committing! But in the meantime, don’t hesitate to get started in WHATEVER word processor you’re most comfortable using. The important thing is to just keep writing!!
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