Imagine a world in which writing your manuscript
was a breeze...
Imagine crossing writing tasks off your to-do list and feeling the accomplishment after sitting down at your computer and successfully finishing your manuscript without writer’s block, insecurities, and never-ending procrastination.
Wouldn’t it be exciting to write up your work and share your amazing science with the world instead of agonizing over the writing process?
Imagine a world where it doesn’t matter if you:
✔︎ Have never before written a paper
✔︎ Consider yourself a bad writer
✔︎ Are not a native English speaker
✔︎ Have no time to spare
GOOD – because the craziest part of this whole scenario
is how EASY it is to get there!
Everyone, no matter their experience, writing skills, or native language, can successfully write a good scientific research paper.
How do I know this?
I was there once – a ball of stress trying to figure out how to write my paper. I was so hard on myself for not being able to sit down and write – and every word was as painful as pulling teeth!
And every single day I wasn’t metaphorically bleeding onto a page, I felt guilty that I wasn’t writing.
I still cringe when I think of the conference abstract that took me DAYS to write.
Days of stress for a few hundred words.
Days where I was not dedicating my energies to my research project.
Ouch.
For my first paper, I quickly learned to avoid even sitting at my desk because I had no idea or plan for what I would do besides stare at my screen and hope that was the day words came out.
I tried reading other papers in the field, but I had no idea how to get from what was in my head to a similar published paper.
I would tentatively write a few words, and then when I read them, I would delete them all. They were awful! This didn’t sound scientific!
I thought maybe if I nailed down a good abstract, it would give me something to build from. But I couldn’t even manage a good abstract, and definitely not one I wanted to build on.
If I actually managed to open my document, I did nothing but stare at my blinking cursor in Word, with no idea where to start or what to work on each day when I sat down, which just made the guilt even worse…
My document looked like this for ages, and I had no idea what to do about it. The blinking cursor on a blank page still gives me nightmares. *shivers*
Then I started to panic.
I knew for sure now that since I couldn’t write like the papers I was reading online, my PI would immediately see I had no idea what I was talking about as soon as he read my writing.
He would never take me seriously as a graduate student, again!
Let me tell you how much that doesn’t help get words on paper.
Not only that, I started physically HIDING from my PI when I heard him in the hallways, because I knew he would ask me how my writing was going.
Hiding.
From my PI.
Like a child playing the world’s worst game of hide-and-seek.
In the end, I did get a paper written.
It took over 6 months and fantastic co-authors that helped me calm down, write some words, and rearrange those words into some semblance of a paper.
…and then my PI promptly re-wrote the entire thing. Ugh.
By the time the paper was published, I was so stressed about the entire process that I never wanted to look at my manuscript again.
During this process, I lived off of comics and PhD humor that exactly reflected this struggle – it helped knowing EVERYONE was going through the same thing!
Now that I am past that stage, though, it just makes me sad – This struggle that’s common to us all should NOT be the norm.
A Better Way
Ok, but my question was always HOW?
- HOW do I write a compelling story? WHAT even makes a compelling story?
- HOW do I know how much background to include?
- HOW do I know when it is too much?
I knew that there must be a better way.
I spent years of reading and editing tons of papers across different fields. Eventually, I figured out patterns behind how exactly information was placed to write a research paper.
And even better, following “good” patterns made a paper good. Following “bad” patterns made a paper difficult to follow or made it easy to miss its importance.
And if there were patterns, there could be formulas!
Maybe science writing didn’t have to be so hand-wavey after all!
From that, I spent hundreds of hours and months and months of time studying papers across science disciplines looking for the exact formulas that would make a paper great and what to avoid to keep it that way.
A very, very small sample of the many papers I read and highlighted looking for patterns!
And from there, I starting developing my course.
Now, this course has been tested by hundreds of students and professors over several years. It has been changed and adapted each time to incorporate all of their feedback, eliminate the confusing points, and answer all of the FAQs.
From this, “Blank Page to Manuscript Draft” was finally born.
The Course
Don’t struggle to do this on your own – instead, benefit from my years of stress and then my years of work and hundreds to a thousand hours spent trying to find a better way.
- No more stress.
- No more wasted time.
No more hiding from your PI to avoid questions about the paper.
Instead, wake up each morning knowing exactly what you need to write that day, where you will find that information, and how to structure it in your manuscript.
The graduate students and post docs who take my course tell me they waste less time and mental energy getting drafts of their manuscripts on paper.
They are also less stressed in the process, as they know each day when they sit down to write exactly what they need to work on that day.
The professors who take or send students to my course tell me they see a marked increase in the quality of the manuscripts that cross their desk and need to spend less time and mental energy on each one and there is less back and forth.
- No more anxious students beating on your door for months asking for your thoughts on their manuscript.
- No more dreading raw student drafts.
- No more stressing that you don’t have the time to provide the feedback to help your students grow.
Instead, feel confident that your students will have a well-organized draft and you can spend your time focusing on what matters – the science.
If you have at least one student manuscript on your desk that you have procrastinated on, do yourself a favor and allow your students to do much of this heavy lifting for you - and give them the tools to do it!
