The struggle of scientific writing

When given the choice between being right and being kind, choose kind

Wayne Dyer

I’ve always considered myself a good writer. Make no mistake, this does not mean that if I were to write a book it would be good (rather certain it won’t). What I mean is that, I was able to explain myself clearly when writing essays, documentation, how-to’s and stuff like that (at least in my undergrad). Or the teachers were rather easy going 🤔, which is also a possibility.

Well, with skills like those you’d say that writing an article would be quite easy. I mean, how hard could it be? Well… it’s not easy.

Hello <scientific>_world.cpp

It should be obvious that this post is not, by any means a scientific post. That being said, in software development there’s this Hello world program that simply displays the words: Hello, World!

# Hello world in python
print("Hello, World!")

According to Wikipedia (remember, this is not a scientific post), this program is often used to illustrate the basic syntax of a programming language. Because of this, chances are this is the first code that you will program when learning any programming language.

That being said, I consider that the first scientific paragraph I wrote, should (in theory) be the academic equivalent of a hello word program. Well… lets see:

• It was part of the introduction.
• Therefore, it introduced the article’s subject.
• It had some citations.
• It was based on multiple reviews I found.
• Most of them were very different.
• They were also hard to fully understand.
• I wasn’t even sure of the subject I wanted to talk.
• I’m starting to question my will to continue writing.
• Also, should I continue on the academic path?
• What the heck is happening??? It’s just a simple short introductory * paragraph!
• Oh god, why can’t I write…
• I’m failing at this…
• This is not for me! I’m out! drops the equivalent of a scientific mic

Scientific writing is hard. And this was not the equivalent of a hello world program. It was not basic nor illustrative 😅. But it did gave me a very small idea of what was to come.

Introducing variables, control structures, templates, classes, objects, compilers… you know what, let’s learn another programming language at the same time!

When this was written, I’m was at version 4 of my review article (hopefully will be published when you read this). Version 1, 2 and 3 felt just like above. If it wasn’t hard enough to write, you need read papers from multiple journals, multiple authors, from many countries of the world, that somehow relate to whatever you are writing. What’s more, you need to understand whatever they wrote so you are able to quote them.

In other words, you need to become an expert in reading papers. Where different authors are the equivalent of a different programming language. Yes, there are sections that most articles share. Such as introduction, conclusion (more if you are lucky). But man… all of this, plus everything else (This can be whatever you want. For example: having a life) is hard.

But not impossible. Just look at how many papers are published around the world! While I do not consider myself an expert, I’ve learnt a couple tricks that have really helped me. I will share them here soon!