Sunday, September 25, 2011

Rejection

I started this weather blog so I could train. I am training to write. Training to identify my poor writing habits, to find my voice, and eventually improve my technical writing. This is not a task, it is a process. I recognize my failings as a scientist and the one thing I have struggled with is my writing. So it was not a surprise to find my recent paper submission was rejected. It was rejected because I failed to communicate my points, create proper linkages, and explain what I had done.

What I have continued to struggle with is to treat my writing as a reviewer rather than the author. I have no trouble being a reviewer. I really put forth a sincere effort to do a lot of paper reviews in the hopes I could retrain my brain to take the self reviewer role. Being a reviewer has helped my ability to review, but not to self-review. I have been successful at times in this process, but not consistently so.

My own self analysis of my writing process revealed that I lack the ability to restart my writing. That is, I begin writing early to get into the flow, but then fail to improve that writing. I am a writing hoarder; keeping sentences that are poorly constructed and writing around them to make up for those deficiencies. I really need to start repairing my thoughts rather than working around sentences. I don't have a solution at the moment. I had hoped that outlining and expanding those outlines would help.

In a lot of ways I have not found my voice and find writing and communicating to be one of the hardest activities in science. I am an excellent support scientist but I really need to take the time to communicate better. So I am trying to reject my bad writing and find a way to becoming a much better communicator.

4 comments:

  1. So what can those around you do to help you "find your voice"?

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  2. Well if it means anything this particular blog post seemed fairly well put together, did not include a lot of unnecessary thoughts or sentences, and got your point across rather well...

    So perhaps it's when the scientific part of your brain is turned on you somehow snap into verbal diarrhea mode? I always go back a couple hours after I've written something and reread it - often out loud, and try to disconnect from my own knowledge of the piece to hear it as someone else would be hearing it - someone who has never heard this before.

    I end up cutting and slicing the crap out of it and rearranging sentences and parts of sentences so they actually make... well, sense :)

    Good luck!

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  3. I heard something else yesterday that made me think of my writing troubles: I have a tendency to tell the story of how I got where I am, rather than telling the story of what I found now that I am here.

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  4. That's true, although I think sometimes telling about the journey and leaving the conclusions to the reader can be a good thing too!

    Just don't give up - it's all a process!

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