The Female Science Professor had a nice post about working with someone who was afraid to write a paper:
Out of desperation, I told the graphophobe to meet me at a particular cafe at a particular time, with the latest draft of the manuscript and whatever other notes or references he needed. We met, I copied the manuscript to my laptop, scrolled to the first extremely incomplete section of the text and said “Tell me what you think should go in this section.” He talked and I typed.
We worked our way through the manuscript that way, discussing each section. What should go in it? What was the best logic? What kind of evidence was needed to support an interpretation? What is the best interpretation? Are there other possibilities? What references should be cited? What figures? Maybe this section should actually go over there, and maybe that part on page 17 should be moved down, and what do you think about this?
We worked for nearly 3 hours like that without stopping. I had thought we might get a couple of pages done, but we finished the paper, or at least, another (complete!) draft of it. Now it can be circulated among other co-authors.
This is a nice reminder that getting started is one of the hardest parts of writing. It’s something I struggle with a bit myself. It’s easy to become paralyzed by trying to think of how to phrase things, and how to organize your thoughts. Sometimes, you just have to sit down and bang out some text, even if it sucks, because that gives you a starting point for revisions.
That can be a daunting prospect, though, and I wonder if it isn’t the root cause of some of the catastrophic failures I’ve seen from students who are plenty smart enough to do the labs, but just never manage to get anything handed in. Pretty much all of the failing grades I’ve given out (not that many) have been due to failures to hand in lab reports.
(And then, of course, there’s the opposite problem: the stream-of-consciousness lab report, where things are written down in whatever order they occurred to the student. The root cause of those is “starting to write the lab eight hours before it’s due,” and there’s not a whole lot to be done about that.)
Lab reports and the grading thereof continue to be the bane of my existence, which means that I’m in for an extra special treat this coming term. I’m teaching both the intro mechanics course, with lab, and also half of the junior/senior level lab course, in which students write multiple formal reports about advanced lab experiments. I’m looking at grading somewhere between 30 and 48 lab reports over the next ten weeks (depending on how I decide to handle the intro labs. Whee!
The topic of labs and lab writing came up a little while ago on a mailing list for advanced lab instructors, which did produce something helpful. This lab web page from Carnegie Mellon includes, about halfway down, an “Outline for organizing a scientific article,” which is a three-page fill-in-the-blank document for getting down the essential elements of a lab report.
I think this is a great idea, and plan to use a version of it with the intro class, and maybe even with the lab class. I hope it will provide a way to help clarify and structure the thoughts of the students who need either a way to kick-start the writing process, or just a helping hand to organize their thoughts. And it ought to be short enough to be reviewed and returned quickly, or at least more quickly than requiring full drafts of the reports (which is the best way to fix problems, but presents a crushing burden for faculty.
And, you know, the basic structure would work for a research article as well. Though it would probably be a little insulting to hand this to a graduate student or post-doc. But then, at that level, you can use FSP’s Coffee Shop Method.