Writing is to science as...

You could plug in multiple analogies to finish this blog title, as long as your choice represents one part as an integral and undeniable requirement for the other. Writing, whether it is for disseminating one's research results to others or for securing research funding through grant proposals, is a large part of any researcher's career. It may come as a surprise how little training in effective scientific writing is provided to graduate students, post-doctoral scientists and other career researchers. Most of my training came from "trial by fire" experience submitting papers and proposals for peer review. I can say, to the credit of this approach, is that you learn quickly where your faults and weaknesses are in your writing. On the downside, your critics are often quite harsh and a thick skin is required. Although to forge a successful career in academic research you will ultimately need this outer shell, a safer and perhaps more consistently constructive mechanism should exist for training.

An article on a New York University course taught by Professor Stephen Hall of the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute was brought to my attention and it seems this course is quite popular and useful. It is a series of workshops geared toward teaching effective writing skills for reporting in fields of science and technology. Though it appears the course is quite intense and the instructor can be quite critical (and expects his students to do the same), this is still a good place to learn with less at stake among a small peer group. Also, the students in the course can be from quite different disciplines, which forces everyone to try and write in ways that can be understood by a wide audience while still getting key points across. This is the ultimate goal in scientific writing, especially for grant writing where much of the review panel may not have expertise in your particular field of research. Making the topic relevant to non-experts is a valuable skill, but one that is difficult to master.

As it turns out, analogies are one of the most effective ways for scientists and researchers to explain their concepts and findings in written publications and reports. When you think about how scientists acquire writing skills, pay attention to how clear and concise the next science article you read seems to be. If you cannot figure out heads from tails based on what the author has written, it may not be your fault. The author may have never had the proper training to easily get the point across to a wide audience. However, that doesn't mean they are off the hook. It seems more and more courses like the one at NYU are popping up, so maybe training in scientific and technical writing will improve for researchers and you may not have to primarily take scientists at their word. I believe this will improve transparency of scientists' work for the public, and help readers independently interpret findings while appreciating the reasoning and interpretation put forth by the researchers. For now, keep training yourself to discern great scientific writers from poor ones and scientists will hopefully keep doing the same.