This is the first in a series of “self-help” posts for PhD students on how to write a scientific paper.

Show me a researcher who has never struggled with writing, and I’ll show you someone who hasn’t written anything, or who doesn’t care about the quality of the output. Science is hard, and so is writing. Together they are harder. Now add in lack of experience as a researcher and as a writer, together with the usual time pressure, and it’s no wonder that the blank document in front of you looks like the north face of Mount Everest. We’ve all been there, staring at that wall.

While no mountaineer would risk climbing Everest without a route plan, an inexperienced writer tends to neglect the importance of planning. Having no plan, she tries to do everything at once. She opens the blank document in her editor, stares at it, tries to decide what to make of her results, what the first sentence of the first paragraph should be, what the point of the first paragraph should be, and what the point of the whole paper should be.

It’s no wonder that this feels impossible. No-one can solve that many problems in parallel. Problems are best solved one at a time.

Writing becomes easier if one separates the process of thinking from the process of writing. To write clearly is to think clearly, and thinking precedes writing. Writing becomes a lot less of a struggle when you think through the right things in the right order, before putting down a single word.  A successful software project begins with the big picture: what functions and classes are needed, and for what purpose. It doesn’t begin with developing code for the internal bits of these functions and classes. A writing project should also begin with addressing the overall point and structure of the paper, before moving to details such as words or sentences.

Another way of looking at the problem is linearity versus modularity. The fear of the blank page arises out of linearity: the feeling that the only way to fill the page is to start with the first word and proceed towards the last, word by word. This is not so. Whereas reading is usually linear, writing doesn’t have to be. The process of writing should be modular – first, sculpt your raw materials into rough blocks that form your text, and then start working on the blocks, filling in more and more details, so that entire sentences only begin appearing towards the end of this process.

The approach I try to teach my students is splitting the writing process into a series of hierarchical tasks. This way, getting from a pile of results to a polished research paper is a bit less painful.

This approach begins by identifying the key point of the paper and then moving on to structuring the material that supports this point into a storyline. This storyline is then condensed into the abstract of the paper. My advice is to always write the abstract first, not last! This serves as an acid test: if you cannot do it, you haven’t developed your storyline enough.

After that, there are many steps to be taken before writing any more complete sentences: planning the order of presentation, including figures, and for each section of the paper, mapping the arc of the storyline into paragraphs so that the point addressed by each of the paragraphs is decided in advance. Then, the paragraph contents are expanded into rough sketches, and these sketches are finally transformed into whole sentences. At this point, there is no fear of the blank page, because there are no blank pages: for each section, for each paragraph, there is a map, a route plan, and the only decision that is needed is how to best transform that plan into series of words. Often, this feels almost effortless.

[Next in the series on how to write a scientific paper: how to write a great abstract]

There is now an ebook based on this series, available from a number of stores (Kindle Store, Apple Books, Kobo, Tolino, etc!)