This entry is about the process I go through when I'm preparing to write, and is especially focused on one of the most important aspects of writing: reading.

 

Many of you will be familiar with literature searches, so I will not spend any time on that. Suffice to say that once you have used your key words to find the (usually) dozens or even hundreds of papers apparently related to your research topic, you have to scan through the titles and abstracts to see if the research presented in each paper is in fact appropriate to your work. By looking quickly through the .pdf files online I could quickly assess the general relevance of the paper. Often, many articles of interest to me were not online, and I had to find them in the hard-copy journal collections in my university library. Fortunately, historical articles are being increasingly scanned and placed online. However, I used to very much enjoy searching the library shelves, because in the process of looking through the old and dusty tomes I would often find interesting articles that I would never otherwise have seen in a purely electronic search.

 

I will assume you have completed this step and now have a collection of scientific papers that you have to review to build the justifications for your own research, and to support your interpretations of the results.
In the past I printed all the articles I wanted to review. I liked having a hard-copy document on which to make notes, and I still do. I would read each of the papers in my large pile, usually skim reading over it initially to see if it was in fact relevant to my research questions. If it was relevant to a particular strand of my research I would place it in a new pile. I would continue this process until I had several piles, each related to a different topic of my research. For example, one pile may have been papers already published on my study area, or areas with similar geology, tectonic dynamics or climate. Another pile may have been papers on using Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to construct digital terrain models to quantify landscape evolution. Another pile may have been paleoclimatic and paleoecological reconstructions of New Zealand and the world, which provided background and context for my own paleoclimatic analyses and interpretations.

 

I would then spend time carefully reading each pile. In contrast to the initial skim reading, this is what I call deep reading. I spent time making sure I understood each sentence in each paragraph, and highlighting key phrases or paragraphs I thought I could use in my own writing. This was a time-consuming process, but was absolutely essential so that I could cite each work in the appropriate context. When I finished deep-reading each paper, I would write a brief summary on the title page, often only several words, to remind me what the main themes and conclusions were.

 

Often, the paper I was reading would cite another piece of vital information in another paper. So I would have to go back to the online databases and the library and get those articles too. And in turn I would have to skim-read, sort and then deep-read them. My piles of articles would grow quickly.

 

Now would come the difficult part: writing. For my postgraduate research I had to write significant literature reviews, and because of its complex multi-disciplinary nature there were several themes that I needed to write about. How did I do it? At the beginning of my scientific career I was still very inexperienced at scientific writing, and found it difficult to construct scientific arguments. I would often copy the text (usually several paragraphs I had identified in my deep reading as important) of a relevant paper into my Microsoft Word document so I had they words directly in front of me. I would then paraphrase or summarize the text in my own words. Being able to do this is important for two reasons: 1) You should never copy verbatim the words of another author because it is lazy (I will talk about the importance of referencing correctly in my next post) and 2) if you can re-write the piece of information in a different way, or provide a succinct summary, then you have understood the original meaning and can better use the information in your own arguments.

 

At the end of this process of re-writing I would often carefully re-read the original parts of the papers I was using to confirm I had included the key pieces of information in my paraphrasing. After a while I would have several pieces of writing that summarized the key aspects of other peoples’ research that were relevant to my own. It was then a matter of tying them together to make a logical and consistent argument, using the ideas and results of previous research to present background, and use them to lead up to my own specific aims and objectives. This was an iterative process, and often I had to change things around and back again. With time, and many re-writes, I produced pieces of work that I and my colleagues and supervisors were happy with.
As time passed, I would become more efficient at this process. Importantly, the more I read, the more I became familiar with the standard terms and phrases of my science. I could therefore rapidly assess the value of a paper to my own work, and with more confidence use this language in my own writing. In this way my scientific reading and writing became a recursive process, creating positive feedback where my skill in one improved my skill in the other.

 

For those of you who are native Chinese speakers, my main message is this: good readers make good writers. The more English text you can read in your scientific field, the more you will be able to recognize key terms and phrases which will assist you rapidly assessing the relevance of papers to your research. The greater familiarity you gain with the English vocabulary and grammar of your discipline, the more easily you will be able to use it in your writing. The more you do it, the better you will become.

 

 

Matthew Hughes

Senior Editor and Trainer, Edanz Group China