Your BASE for mentoring scientific writers

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Note: This is a jointly-written post with Bethann Garramon Merkle. But it shifts a bunch from “I” to “we” and back again, and I think you’ll see why. Apologies for the viewpoint tangling.

I had an interesting chat with a colleague a while back in which he described a common complaint among faculty members in his professional circles. Faculty, he said, receive draft manuscripts from their students, realize the drafts aren’t in great shape, realize it would take them hours and hours to make the drafts better and in any case they aren’t sure how to do that – and so they give up (on the drafts, and at least implicitly, on the students).

Hearing this made me sad, but it didn’t really shock me, because as hard as writing is, mentoring (or teaching) writing is harder. Continue reading →

It’s not enough to make a paper exist

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There are many things I was wrong about, early in my career. When I posted just recently about my discomfort with “done is better than perfect” advice, it reminded me of one of those things. For at least the first half of my career, I thought about papers as simply needing to join the scientific literature. My job, as I conceived it, was to make a paper good enough to pass peer review, so that it could be published by a journal and thus be available to those who wanted, or needed, to read it. Once it was there, available on library shelves or (more recently) in online search results, my job was done.

This is what I’d call a “pull” view of the scientific literature. Continue reading →

Stop buying my book! (Because the third edition is nearly out)

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For some reason, people are buying my book – and I wish they’d stop, at least for a while.

This one, I mean: The Scientist’s Guide to Writing. I’ve written two others, and if you’d like to buy one of those, go right ahead! Charles Darwin’s Barnacle and David Bowie’s Spider is “more fun than you’ve ever had with taxonomy in your whole entire life”, Diana Gabaldon said, and if that seems like a low bar, well, you don’t know the treats in store for you. And Teaching and Mentoring Writers in the Sciences is the book that (if you teach writing, or mentor writers, which virtually all of us do) will help you mentor better, and as a bonus save you so much time you’ll be able to read Charles Darwin’s Barnacle.

Anyway, back to The Scientist’s Guide to Writing. Continue reading →

Things I’ve made that are beautiful

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Warning: slightly treacly.

There’s a children’s picture book I love: Barbara Cooney’s Miss Rumphius. I wrote about it some years ago at more length, but for today’s post all you need to know is that Miss Rumphius begins as the story of a little girl hearing her grandfather’s stories, and telling him that one day she, too, will visit faraway places and that she, too, will live by the sea. “That is all very well, little Alice”, her grandfather replies, “but there is a third thing you must do… you must do something to make the world more beautiful”.

I’ve lived by the sea, and I’ve visited faraway places. But what about doing something to make the world more beautiful? Continue reading →

The excellent writing advice that I can’t quite get behind

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There’s a piece of writing advice that I run across a lot (I’ve even given it). It’s excellent advice, except that it isn’t. Which doesn’t make much sense even to me, so I’m going to try to unpack it a little.

The advice? It comes in various forms, usually along the lines of “Done is better than perfect”, or “The worst thing you finish will always be better than the best thing you didn’t.” (I saw the latter form most recently on Bluesky from the novelist Paolo Bacigalupi). And at some level, it’s obviously true. It’s especially true for scientific writing: there’s no point even doing science if the results sit in a binder, or a digital folder, and don’t get published for others to read and build on.

My problem with “Done is better than perfect” and its kin is that the sentiment can be an invitation to be sloppy, to rush, to not care about your reader. Continue reading →

The Sagrada Familia, and good science I don’t like

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A few weeks ago, I was on vacation* in Barcelona, Spain. One of Barcelona’s most famous attractions is its enormous church, the Basilica de la Sagrada Familia (“Holy Family Basilica”), designed by Catalan architect Antoni Gaudí (1852-1926) and under continuous construction since 1882.** It’s an astonishing building – fascinating, visionary, unique, mind-bending. And I didn’t like it.

OK, that’s maybe a bit strong. There were details I liked very much: for example, in the nave, the play of light through the stained glass and the arches above the main pillars; and on the exterior, the striking Art Nouveau sculptures of the Passion Façade (the work, primarily, not of Gaudí but of Josep Maria Subirachs). But overall, as a building, the Sagrada doesn’t please me. It somehow manages to be both soaring and squat; it’s lumpy; it’s too big for its site; it’s busy with decorations that are individually interesting but that don’t cohere.

This made me think about science. Continue reading →

Good teaching is 15% straight-up entertainment – and that’s OK

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I spent a good fraction of my career’s work effort on teaching, and – like most academics – I had very nearly no idea what I was doing. I’d never had a moment’s formal training in teaching, and, at least in my early days, it definitely showed. But I was reminded recently that I got one thing right completely by accident; and it came to shape my teaching in an important way.

Here’s how that reminder came. Continue reading →

I haven’t written the ‘Principia’

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What’s the single most important publication in the history of science? I mean, there’s no such thing, obviously; but if we made a short list anyway it would have to start with Isaac Newton’s Principia Mathematica and Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species. The former put all of physics on a solid foundation; the latter did the same for biology. Each was a dramatic leap forward, an astonishing work by a brilliant individual whose name remains famous centuries later. Not just famous-among-scientists, I mean, but actually famous: both Newton and Darwin have appeared on The Simpsons (do we really need more evidence than that?).

I’ve never published anything remotely approaching the Principia or the Origin, but I don’t care. Here’s why: Continue reading →

Culture in scientific naming

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Scientific naming has a strong cultural component. I don’t mean Latin names that reference Hamlet or Der Ring des Nibelungenas or Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (although those exist). Instead, I mean that the kinds of names scientists give to newly described species vary, among scientists. And the best explanation for this is that different scientists, and different groups of scientists, do science differently in ways that don’t have a basis in objective best practices – that is, it’s culture, not function. This is one thing that makes science a fully human activity – and that makes science interesting.

I was reminded of all this by a surprise I got reading that paper (remember, from 2 weeks ago?) describing 98 new species of fungus gnat from Singapore. You wouldn’t think 318 pages of densely technical species descriptions – for fungus gnats, no less – could be fascinating. You’d be wrong. Continue reading →

Everyone else’s kitchen is tidier than mine – and writing is hard.

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I was making some bread the other day, and I looked around my kitchen and thought “gosh, what kind of cyclone hit here?” Because I’d been over to a friend’s place a few days before and their kitchen was tidy; and a different friend’s the week before, and their kitchen was tidy; and… well, you get the idea.

This is a post about writing. I know what you’re thinking: how on earth will Steve make this a post about writing? Can he make anything a post about writing? Read on (and yes). Continue reading →