As a physics professor I write a lot, and I also spend a lot of time editing other people’s writing. In fact, I would say that writing is probably the most important part of my job. Of course I have to be good at physics, and I have to have good ideas, and I have to keep beating on my students – pardon me, I mean constructively encouraging my students – to get things done, but none of this would get me anywhere if I couldn’t write about it. I think it’s also true that writing is an extremely important part of many other jobs that our students could find themselves in after leaving school – almost everyone has to write a report to their boss at some point. 

On the way to getting this job, I had to write a couple of theses, which are essentially full-length books about the research I did as a student. I need money to pay my students and to run my research operation, and to get money I need to write grant proposals. While the ideas and so on are very important, if I can’t express those ideas clearly in the written proposal, I shouldn’t expect to get funded. Once the research is done, I have to tell the world about it, and I do this by writing papers. It is a lot easier to get a paper published if it is well-written, and, more importantly, it is a lot easier for other scientists to read and understand a paper that is well-written. Since my ultimate success as a physics researcher depends on how other people regard my research, I am not going to be successful if I am unable to get people to read about my work.

My students have to write, too, and since I want my students to succeed, I try very hard to ensure that what they write is of high quality. This is sometimes very hard. I have had students who write very well, but I have also had students whose writing was awful. Sometimes language is an issue – it is obviously very difficult for someone to write a 300-page PhD thesis in their second language – but often there are problems that go beyond language. I have had students who were native speakers but had essentially no idea how to string sentences together to tell a coherent story. I had a student from China whose English writing was grammatically and structurally fine, but completely disorganized. That student told me that she was a poor writer even in her own language.

There are several aspects to writing. The first has nothing to do with the actual words: it is the ability to get the content right. On a large scale, this involves deciding what you want to say, what ideas you want to convey, essentially what the story is that you want to tell. On a smaller scale, you need to figure out what level of detail is appropriate, and you have to organize what you want to say: you need to decide in what order to present things so as to produce a clear and logical storyline. These are hard things to do, especially for one who has not done a lot of serious technical writing. One you know what you want to say, you need to write it down. Here you have to worry about the mechanics of writing – sentences and paragraphs, spelling and punctuation. This seems to be hard for some people, too, despite that fact that in this case there are usually rules that can be learned and, one hopes, followed. A third aspect involves getting the right style – a physics journal paper would be written in a very different style from a letter to your mom. In my view, the first aspect is by far the most important. It is relatively easy to edit a well-organized draft for grammar, punctuation, and even style, but it’s a lot harder to deal with a piece of writing that is poorly organized, is missing important information, or wanders through the subject matter like the random walks I talked about in my last post. 

I think it’s essential that our students learn how to write properly. I’m less certain how to achieve this. Certainly practice is essential, and for that reason I always assign essays or written projects in my third- and fourth-year courses and grad courses. But students need to get feedback on their writing if they are going to become good at it, and they don’t really get that until they start working on their honors thesis. Western has courses on technical writing, but there really isn’t any space in our modules for them. I’ve thought about teaching students to write in our seminar course, but it’s hard to make students do much work in a zero-credit course.

I’ll have more to say about this subject in future posts.