[This post continues my “self-help” series on how to write a scientific paper for PhD students; the previous episode can be found here. This series is an attempt to share some of the conceptual tools that I use with my students. Their point is to structure your thinking and focus your decision-making on a limited number of problems at a given time; having all options open at all times is an enemy of creativity.]

Scientific papers are stories, not just containers of information. The more focused and exciting the story, the more likely it is that it reaches someone. This is because that someone has to decide to invest their time in reading the paper, and as we all know, the world is full of papers, too many for any of us to read.

Thinking of papers as stories is something that doesn’t come naturally to most Ph.D. students or scientists. If we have been taught at all, we have been taught to write (boring) reports, certainly not to develop storylines, or to work with the kinds of higher-level conceptual elements that, say, journalists use.

Good writing starts with careful planning. I usually plan my storyline in three steps.

The first is defining the key point of the paper, the main conclusion that you want to tell the world. The second step is choosing the essential building blocks for the rest of the storyline, leaving out all results that are not necessary. The third step is taking these building blocks and arranging them into a condensed version of the storyline: the abstract of the paper. That’s right – I recommend writing the abstract before the rest of the paper. This is unconventional but it works.

Defining the focus of the paper – its key point and its main conclusion – is the most important step, as it lays the foundation for the rest.

In the best case, the key point is a single important result, but usually, things are slightly more complicated than that. In any case, you should be able to explain your point and main conclusion with one to three sentences. If you think that this is too little, consider these: the Earth rotates around the Sun, and not vice versa. Space-time is curved by mass. The salt of deoxyribose nucleic acid has a structure with two helical chains, suggesting a possible copying mechanism for genetic material. And so on. Clearly, a sharp focus doesn’t mean that the result is simplistic – to the contrary, there is usually a lot of depth behind results that can be described with a few words.

Choosing a key point that can be condensed into a few sentences doesn’t imply that your paper has to be narrow in scope. If your work is of an exploratory nature your key result might be that you have mapped out a problem area and your paper provides the map, or perhaps your main conclusion is a broad synthesis of several sub-results that make up the bulk of your paper. The most important thing is that you can make it clear to the reader what your paper is about.

If you can compress your message into a package that can be easily communicated, the higher the likelihood that it reaches its intended target, the reader. This is not limited to primary transmission – say, the reader encountering your abstract on the arXiv and deciding to read on – but secondary transmission is important too: getting the reader to share your paper with colleagues, online or face-to-face. Whatever the type of transmission, it works best if the thing being transmitted is compact and focused.

Communication is always difficult and all communication channels are noisy – a tight focus helps your message to make it through in one piece.

Next: Theatrical Cut, Or How To Konmari Your Paper