How Authors Learn Writing Skills

I'm revising an essay on scientific writing and citation skills, and am tempted to make the following claim:

"The training of scientists and physicians as writers in their discipline is haphazard. It usually ends, in any formal sense, in undergraduate composition classes, but sometimes is cultivated as mentored co-authorship during postgraduate training and, rarely, under the guise of "copy editing."

I had a wonderful experience this past year with a prominent review journal in which I thought I learned interactively a great deal about writing from both the shepherding editor and the copy editor. But this is not the usual experience, and the journals for which I usually review articles do not seem to have a mechanism (as if they had the time) for mentor editing. Hence I include the practice but qualify it as rare. But is it rare in fact?

John R. Rodgers
Department of Immunology, Baylor College of Medicine

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I think that, essentially, you are correct. I say "essentially," because although most authors learn how to write, they learn how to write in the tradition of the humanities, not in the tradition of the sciences. In my opinion, this situation has profound implications on any number of fronts.

However, what instruction is available in the sciences is most likely to come from the mentoring you mention. From my perspective as a professional medical writer, such instruction is still woefully inadequate, but it is often the best available.

Tom
Tom Lang Communications and Training

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Perhaps this is disciplinary? I felt that much of what I learned both in graduate school and as a post-doc was writing. This was done entirely through working on dissertations and published papers with my mentors. My former graduate students will certainly tell you that this is much of what I tried to teach them! I don't think my experience is unusual in psychology, although my husband certainly did not have this experienced as a biologist.

I do think learning to write from editors is rare however. One of our former editors, however, was very good at this and spent a lot of time shepherding especially junior and less prepared authors through the publication process. He is in the process of phasing out of our journal and going to a smaller journal (the size we were when he started 20 years ago) partly so that he can continue that very time-intensive process.

Nancy Darling

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John Rodgers writes:
"The training of scientists and physicians as writers in their discipline is haphazard. It usually ends, in any formal sense, in undergraduate composition classes, but sometimes is cultivated as mentored co-authorship during postgraduate training and, rarely, under the guise of "copy editing."

From my experience in a UK Medical School I say that you are absolutely right. I used to run one-day workshops for biomedical PhD students, but in one day all you can do is tell them what they have to do, but not how to do it. There was no instruction for undergraduates whatsoever. It would seem to me that unless a student is unusually gifted in the art of writing that the PhD thesis is likely to be a reflection on the input of the supervisor and/or other willing individuals (some students even employ copy editors, if they can afford to). Sadly, this inadequacy continues when these same individuals write up their research, and it usually falls to the copy editor to improve the composition.

Moira Johnson-Vekony

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Moira Vekony writes that "some students even employ copy-editors."

I would add that they learn to do so from their supervisors as part of being mentored during co-authorship. Indeed, in places where English is not the authors' first language (E2 situations), one of the behaviors a student needs to learn is effective interaction with an author's editor. Effective interaction gets all the help and guidance needed, but it leaves the authors feeling that the paper is still theirs, including its words.

Especially in the system by which an E2 student needs to have published a certain number of papers to be bound to be called a thesis (Am: dissertation), it's often a mentor/supervisor who pays to send a student to an author's editor for guidance on revision and copyediting before and after submittal. The supervisor/mentor may attend a session along with the student. The student gets a lot of writing instruction this way, from me anyway. Before I understood this system, it was sometimes the supervisor alone who brought or sent me the paper and the student never learned how it had all come together. Later, however, I began to insist on receiving the students.

It's best when some sessions can happen face-to-face. However, I have managed to give mini-lessons on specific writing points during the editing process to authors as far away from me as Chile and Turkey. To make such instruction/editing a bit more widely available, I am currently working on an online semi-tutorial course to guide students from the earliest writing of a paper through to first submittal (2 tutorial courses), with final editing; a third tutorial course will deal with revision and re-submittal after peer review.

The courses are based on needs described by a group of instructors from a local university who work with doctors in the Caribbean—not all cities have author's editors on hand. But I have an additional working hypothesis: that in many cultures it is embarrassing to admit you might need help with writing course and this prevents people from signing up for traditional classroom instruction if not obliged to or it prevents them from assimilating all but superficial information if they don't really want to be there. So, I expect local students might be interested in such face-saving instruction that culminates in at least one draft of editing of their text.

M.E. Kerans
Barcelona, Spain
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