Paper review

To stay in the academic loop, I'm a reviewer for two major journals in my field.  Been doing this since as soon as I graduated a few years back.  The past year I've reviewed about a dozen papers.

When I was in grad school, at first I thought everything was brand spanking new and going to change the world. That quickly changed as I realized that the research was cool and beneficial but 99.9% of it won't have any direct clinical impact. For the stuff that isn't basic science it's still so far cutting edge that the impact is unrealized. In industry, my work has changed the medical device world with tons of direct impact. Well, maybe not the world, but 10's of thousand's of peoples' lives. But it's not really brand spanking new besides a few things.  But I have to keep these things on the D.L. to keep other companies from utilizing it.  A lot of the ideas in the papers I've read have been thought of before. I've only read one article that I was amazed by, but it was written so poorly it nearly got completely rejected. I reviewed this paper this week and it reminded me about how awesome writing is. 

It's a great way to organize your thoughts. Throw some pictures and diagrams in a great document and you've just won yourself a multimillion dollar grant. Or look back at your old writing and discover how much better you've become. Or discover how you've changed as a person and scientist. But you don't necessarily need good writing for nonprofessional writing (ahem...this blog).

I love technical writing because it's the culmination of a lot of hard work. Through the planning, organizing, reporting, and discussing results, it's a lot of fun to pull everything together and let the world know what's going on. In order to do this, the language of most prevalence is English. While my English isn't the best I'm pretty decent at disseminating my work. This paper I'm reviewing is reminding me that if you want to do science you should either learn great English writing or work and publish in an area where you don't need good English. With this paper I'm reading it's just such a shame that the PI approved submitting this paper without reworking the writing and figures. I'm going to try and push this into major revs (so it's not killed) because it's great work. It's just very tough since the writing and figs are sub-par. As a big fan of writing, it just kills me to see work like this that's been approved by a PI. If this person tried to submit this crap to the FDA he would be heavily punished for it. The PI is doing the grad student that wrote this a disservice by not pushing the student to learn better writing skills. Some people will probably say, "students won't listen, are incapable, don't have time, etc".  To that, I was a mediocre writer when I entered grad school. My former advisor wouldn't let me submit anything for publication until he says it was acceptable. This improved my writing dramatically.  At first it took forever (months of constant rewrites) to submit pubs.  Holding off publication (and therefore graduation) is one of the few things PIs can use to control the students. And it's for good reason: learning to disseminate information is part of the scientific process, so this needs to be learned. 

Again, this is probably just my naïveté. But my advisor was just as busy as the rest and had time to teach me writing. I teach entry level scientists and engineers better writing. Why can't the corresponding author on this paper teach good writing? Or at least not let this garbage get submitted. 

Writing style

Putting together my application documents, running them through some faculty member's edits, and working on next year's app if this year doesn't pan out has reminded me how academic writing is different. In my current industrial job I have to do writing. I write to my coworkers, bosses, doctors, and to the FDA.  No one ever has clarification questions, and I've never gotten complaints about my writing. 

The very first manuscript I produced went though 18 edits with my old advisor. 18!  That's crazy, considering the amount of time it took to go through each one. Although the time got less with each consecutive edit. The amount of edits went down to just a single edit by the time I got my final paper out. My advisor really helped me write more gooder :).  One comment I still got from him and reviewers was that my writing is "too simplified, and should be written more scientifically".

I have a dear friend that teaches technical writing for the government, companies, and various universities. He's written a book on how to best perform technical writing, and I have him regularly edit my documents. He reorganizes my sentences and changes word usage (English wasn't my first language), but has never said my writing isn't understandable. In fact, he says he understands most of the core concepts of my papers after reading them. This is something I take great pride in. I read scientific articles in my own field that regularly confuse me because they're too scientific. 

My bud always says his philosophy is that the point of writing is to let other people know your thoughts, results, etc. If you're not writing for clarity, then you're doing it wrong. Period. I mostly agree but with one caveat for scientific journals and presentations: the public is paying for you to do your work. You are lucky enough to be the recipient of tax funds, and as such, have an obligation to let the public know how you're spending their money. Just like in a company, I have a personal responsibility to let my employer know how I'm spending their money. When I was in academia, I tried my best to make sure everyone could understand my talks and papers. This was not just for reviewers and scientific writers, but to make sure that the public could at least understand the basics. It got on my nerves when a presenter at public forums my old university used to put on would present in a way where only the scientists in the room could understand. It is our duty and responsibility to the people who fund our research. And I'll keep writing and presenting in so-called "unprofessional" ways if the most important people, the tax-payers, understand it.