writing a paper

I like writing papers.

Trying to convey complex ideas in a limited space forces me to really understand and discern what really matters. I often find myself understanding things in greater detail and depth as I write them down.

At the same time, I find the academic paper-publishing stressful and anxiety-inducing: deadlines force us to sometimes compromise between having a decent paper and making decent science, the way papers are written is sometimes unnecessarily complex and convoluted, trying to sound formal and pompous at the cost of clarity.

All of this brings back high-school memories. The flavor of high school I attended has a focus on ancient and modern languages and literature, philosophy, humanities, and all of that involves a lot of writing.
My high-school literature professors often had to remind us to “speak the way we eat” (parla come mangi) and “write the way we speak” (great advice by David Ogilvy). I often think of them when I write papers, trying to make the message clear and resist the urge to sound pretentious. Also, some of the clearer papers I know are written in a distinctively natural style that sounds indeed informal, compared to most papers out there, but they are so much clearer and immediate!

Learning to convey ideas clearly is a continuous exercise, and we learn to write by writing (also courtesy of a high-school prof). This is possibly more true for ideas that are complex and based on a lot of technical background, such as what we often talk about in research papers. Factors such as approaching deadlines, stress, sleep deprivation, and a lot of responsibility for your and other people’s work do not help in practicing and searching for clarity.

At the same time, going through this process always teaches me something new about writing, about myself, about teamwork (it takes a village to raise a paper). Also, it is the only way I know to get better at paper management and writing.

A non-exhaustive list of things I’ve learnt thanks to paper writing and deadlines:

More-or-less mechanical things we can do that significantly improve the paper

• captions only: if a reader only goes through the figures, the story should emerge clearly and be consistent from the captions. Captions should not be obvious (“we show our result”), but should be insightful (“our work is faster/slower/better/worse”). Doing a pass that only focuses on captions helps us find inconsistencies, for example, figures where we call the same thing in different ways. It’s hard to notice these inconsistencies when going through the paper in the flow.
• numbers only: as we update the evaluation of a paper, we often change the metrics we use (even last-minute, to my great despair 🫠). This means that things that were previously “1.5x faster” become “50% slower”. When writing a paper, it’s useful to do a pass and only check that the numbers make sense (percentages have %, ratios have x, we say more/less/higher/lower consistently with the numbers). This is also easy to miss in the flow and while writing, but it’s a mechanical check that ensures the claims make sense.
• references only: no reviewer will be happy to find references that don’t support the claim they’re cited at, or that are broken, or that refer to an obsolete version of something. Another rather mechanical pass consists of checking that whenever we cite something, that something is consistent with the sentence it’s cited in.

Figures are important

A well-crafted figure can convey at a glance the key novelty of a work, and no reviewer will be unhappy with being eased into understanding something. My inner crafty bitch greatly enjoys figures too: I spend hours thinking about them, thinking about the colors, and ensuring that we color things consistently in the paper. While this might well be excessive, I find that laying out on a figure the key components of my work also forces me to exercise clarity and make choices about what’s worth including and what isn’t.

Brainstorming is a powerful way to improve quality and teamwork

When working on a paper in a team, it often happens that we don’t agree on a certain sentence. I find brainstorming a good way to get unstuck in these situations, as long as we do it spontaneously and fast. Producing as many alternative sentences as possible, with roughly the same meaning, without thinking, gives everyone the opportunity to take any one of the alternatives and fix it: fixing a sentence is easier than coming up with an entirely new one. As we start to produce fixed alternatives, that we continue to refine and like better, we converge.

It’s important to stay focused

I don’t manage stress well, I get anxious and tend to become unfocused and splinter my energy in worrying about everything. Having a clear priority list of what the paper needs (and someone who reminds you of said list if you get lost) helps me manage better, especially when we want to coordinate the efforts of multiple people and we want to split tasks. Once I have a list, even when I’m anxious and stressed, I somehow manage to FIFO-focus on one task at a time and avoid being overwhelmed by everything. Whenever leading a paper, it’s useful to have this list clear in mind and assign tasks accordingly, preventing our co-workers from getting overwhelmed and ensuring we make the most of everyone’s time and energy.

Patti chiari, amicizia lunga

I believe the English equivalent is good fences make good neighbours. Deadlines are stressful, and it’s not always easy to manage disagreements gracefully. I find it pretty hard, in fact, and try to remember that:

1. It’s important to establish good teamwork practices as early as possible.

   What tools do we use and why? How do we ensure we do not conflict with other people’s writing? How do we manage disagreements over a sentence? How do we talk about complex-but-known-in-the-community concept X? How do we take responsibility for a task? Who manages responsibilities and tasks? How do we communicate our availabilities? How do we force decisions when we get stuck?

I find it much easier to work in a context where the answer to these questions is clear.

2. A paper is just a paper (again courtesy of my literature high-school prof, who would remind us that a grade is just the result of a 2h performance). It does not say anything about our value as people and can be influenced by a lot of factors, many of which we can’t control. It’s important to remember that we’re all humans, we make mistakes (and we will, in fact, make mistakes: a lot of them). Disagreements over technical issues are not personal, and neither are judgments over a sentence/section/chapter.

3. Science is a collaborative effort and is (should be?) about the pleasure we find in discovering and improving human understanding. It’s okay to not present the best, fastest, smartest thing possible. The purpose of science is to advance knowledge, whether the knowledge is about something that works amazingly or about something that does not work. Unfortunately, this is really not valued in academic papers, but I find it useful to sometimes remind myself of science’s purpose.