Full steam on

I’ve just passed my Preliminary Exam. It’s a preliminary defense of my thesis where I showed what I have done and what I plan to do, and the thesis committee provides their feedback.

I’m at very good place in my PhD right now. After two and a half years into the program, I’ve finished all the coursework requirements (with 8 As and a B), completed my teaching assistantship (and received an Outstanding Teaching Assistant Award from my pillar), completed two summer projects (one of which eventually became a paper one and a half years later), attended two conferences (and met amazing people), published one paper in Water Resources Research, reviewed 5 papers, and passed both Qualifying and Preliminary Exams. With all the other requirements done, I am now ready to go full steam on research. Depending on how the results are going to pan out, I have between three and six papers in the pipeline. That’s amazing. That’s so exciting. I can’t finish them all within my PhD of course, but I have enough ideas to keep going for a while even after my PhD.

I think doing a PhD is one of the two best decisions I’ve made in my life (the other one was to propose to my wife).

Keep calm and do research. Full steam on.

Writing Science – A book by Joshua Schimel

“As a scientist, you are a professional writer.”

This is the opening sentence of the first and the last chapters of the book. It completely changed my perspective on writing. I don’t just write because I must; a writer is who I am. My science is meaningless if it is done and shelved; it needs to be communicated. So, as a scientist, I do science and I write science.

“Writing is story-telling” is the second mandate of the book. In fact, the whole book is about how to tell a story that sticks. Sticky stories have six elements embodied in SUCCES: Simple, Unexpected, Concrete and Credible Stories.

A sticky story is simple so that readers understand. In every good story, there is the simplest idea that can be distilled from the writing (not buried in it). However, simple doesn’t mean simplistic. A simplistic idea is trivial and does not address the core of the problem. The idea that “Streamflow is a complex process” is simplistic. What’s a simple idea then? “Streamflow is governed by climatic inputs and catchment dynamics.”

A sticky story is unexpected so that readers remember. Unexpectedness means novelty, which lies in the reader’s knowledge gap. This gap must be identified first. Tell the reader what he doesn’t know that he doesn’t know. Make him think “Wow, why didn’t I think of that before?”

A sticky story is concrete so that readers can relate to. The ability to bring science’s abstraction down to concrete examples, data and numbers is what separates an expert from a novice. Concreteness is also what separates a good communicator from a bad one. I remember a particular class where the instructor did not give many examples for abstract mathematical concepts; the class was unnecessarily difficult.

A sticky story is credible so that readers believe. “Credibility goes hand in hand with being concrete”, wrote Schimel; both qualities rely on facts, figures, data, and numbers. Credibility can be undermined by buzzwords and hype, lipsticks and make-ups that mask out what is important, so beware of this trap.

A sticky story is emotional so that readers act on it. The number one, perhaps the only one, legitimate emotion in science is curiosity. It is what makes scientists ticks, it is what makes them spend their lives searching for knowledge. A good story must engage the reader’s curiosity by asking good questions.

Lastly, but most importantly, a sticky story has to be a story. It must have characters and plots. Characters are scientific concepts, and plots lie in the story structure. After spending three chapters describing a good story, the book used the next ten chapters to discuss good structures.

There are three main structures for a paper: OCAR (Opening, Challenge, Action, Resolution), LD (Lead, Development) and LDR (Lead, Development, Resolution). OCAR is the most ubiquitous, especially in specialist journals, but LD and LDR are more common in journals with broad audience such as Science and Nature. Let’s see why.

OCAR. In OCAR, the story develops slowly. Schimel compared this with The Lord of the Rings where the characters are first introduced in Chapter 1, then we only get a glimpse of Frodo and Sam’s challenge in Chapter 2, and the full challenge halfway through the first book. The OCAR structure is well suited for a scientific paper because the readers are patient and they want to assess the idea presented properly.

One thing I liked about OCAR is its spiral form (Figure 4.1 in the book).  The R must link back to the O. Even more interestingly, OCAR also has an hourglass shape (Figure 4.2 in the book): a wide opening, a narrow challenge and action, and finally a wide resolution. What’s more, the widths of O and R must match. If O is wider than R, we are overpromising and underdelivering. If R is wider than O, we are “underselling”.

LDR and LD. In these two structures, the core of the story, the lead, is loaded in front, and development comes later. With these structures, busy readers are able to grasp the key part of the story without going through its entire development. They may also skip the development if they are not experts in the field, as for the broad audience of Nature and Science.

The story structure does not apply only to the paper as a whole, but for each part of it too. For example, the Introduction most typically follows the OCAR structure while the Results usually follows the LD or LDR structure. Each paragraph in the section has its own structure too. Thus, the internal parts for the paper form story arcs; each arc is a sentence, paragraph or section that tells a story of its own, and they are linked together with fluidity tools such as conjunction and topic/stress formation.

In summary, the two key take home messages for me from the book are (1) that writing science is storytelling and (2) the story structure. I’d like to close this post with a passage from the book that I particularly like.

The need to take multiple passes through a piece, fixing problems as they emerge, explains a frustrating phenomenon I experienced with my advisor, my students have with me, and you probably have as well. You write a draft, someone edits it, and you make those changes. Then, they edit their edits. Sometimes back to the way you had originally written them! Why didn’t they get it right the first time? Are they just changing things to change things? Probably not. Every time you come back to a piece, you need to look at it afresh. Sometimes the changes you scrawled on a sheet of paper or typed in seem okay but don’t really work. You may only realize this when you see the whole new piece or when you read it aloud. Sometimes changes elsewhere in a paragraph mean that you need to rewrite a specific sentence to fit the new structure. Remember the section on “Writing versus Rewriting” in chapter 1. Writing is a process of experimentation and revision; there is no single “right answer.” My last word of consolation on this is that the more you do it, the easier it becomes. It might even become fun.

First paper submitted

What a day to remember. I committed myself to submitting the paper today, and I completed the task just a few minutes before midnight. My wife is on a business trip. I had to put my son to bed first before I could resume my submission, but it wasn’t easy. He missed his mommy and became too emotional. I had to put him in the carrier and walk him to the reservoir until he could sleep. Then I went back to filling all the required information on the submission page, fixing things here and there along the way. Finally, it’s done.

The adolescent scientist

Imagine our scientific career is mapped to a normal human lifespan. Then, in the first PhD year, we are all babies. We don’t know anything, and we are eager to learn. We receive ample guidance to make baby steps. And we grow up fast. By the end of the second year, which is where I am now, we have become adolescents.

Adolescence is a tricky stage. The adolescent scientist is not a child, neither is he an adult. He has gained certain skills, and there are certain expectations of him. Yet, he is still looked upon as a student. He needs to act confident but not arrogant. He needs to gain independence while yearning for guidance. It is hard to strike a balance.

The difficulties not only stem from the outside, but also from within the adolescent scientist himself. The more he learns, the more he needs to learn. With that comes self-doubt: am I good enough? Will I ever be? While asking where he is now, the adolescent scientist needs to think about where he is going. More questions. Part of growing up.

Growing up is the journey where one discovers his identity; it is a process of self-awareness and self-adjustment, baffling and tedious. Learning is a journey where one discovers his passion; it is a process of searching for a question and working for an answer, perplexing and laborious. But with every discovery comes enormous joy; it pushes him forward, ready to ask another question. In a sense, he embraces his adolescence. This stage is, without a doubt, a crucial and memorable part of his scientific career.

Look at the whole audience, and live in the story

Look at the entire audience, not just the most important person in the room. Student speakers often do the latter. Their eyes are drawn to the figure of authority—in the classroom, it’s the instructor, and in a seminar, it’s the department head or a senior professor. While this is still better than no eye contact at all, it is certainly not ideal. Putting aside the fact that the rest of the audience is ignored, this act weakens your position as a speaker. When you speak to the entire audience, you are a scientist sharing your results with the group. When you speak to only the instructor or the chair, you are a student presenting to a professor (and waiting to be assessed). The two positions are different!

The next piece of advice came from S, my unofficial mentor. He said that when he presents, he lives in the story. Now that just brings the “presenting science is telling a story” idea to a whole new level. If one is able to imagine the entire talk as a story in which he is a character, one can actually act out the story. The message will be loud and vivid.

Now, bring the two pieces together: look at the whole audience, and live in the story. The whole talk has just come alive.

Some notes on academic talks

Over the past two years, I have listened to many academic talks, and I have been paying attention to the speakers. Through these observations, I have drawn some important lessons for my own talks. Here are a few things to look out for.

The title carries the most important ideas of a talk, yet many speakers often fail to highlight it. Most speakers, especially younger ones, just quickly read through it from the slide and jump to the next slide. Experienced speakers, however, often pause to tell a bit more; sometimes they tell a story about the origin of the work, and sometimes they explain one or two key terms in the title if the audience are not experts in the field. Personally, I like to use the title as an outline for the talk. I emphasize several keywords, which appear one at a time on the title slide, and tell the audience that these are the things that I will talk about. I then show the remaining words, those that link the keywords, and along with them I give the overall story of how everything comes together.

The “Table of content” slide is a dreaded one, especially if you show 10 items and read through them one by one. Some avoid this by showing 10 items, saying “This is the outline” then jumping right to the next slide. That does not work either. The content slide, if present, should contain only three or four big ideas that strongly resonate with the title (which, by the way, is still fresh in the audience’s mind). Avoid boring content slide that says “Introduction, Methodology, Results and Discussion, Conclusions”. In an academic talk, these go without saying.

To make people interested in your talk, you must motivate it well. The way to do that is to answer why. “Why this? Why now? Why this way? Why should the readers care?” are the four crucial questions in the introduction of a paper, according to Jean-Luc LeBrun¹; certainly they must be addressed in the introduction of a talk as well. Tell the audience why your work is important. Tell them why you set out doing what you did. Tell them why you did it in this way and not that. Tell them what the results mean to science and to the world. Don’t just tell them “This is the problem, this is what I did, this is what I found, and in summary, we have ABC”.

This one I learned from Joshua Schimel²: end your talk with the Conclusion slide, and leave it hanging there during Q&A until you have to go back to another slide to answer a question. The Conclusion is the juice of your entire work, the “smile” of your paper (Jean-Luc LeBrun again), and the take home message you want the audience to remember. So stay on the Conclusion slide. There’s no need for a “Thank you” slide or worse, a “Q&A” slide; just say it out loud, e.g. “Thank you for your attention, and I look forward to your questions.”, and leave the audience time to read and assimilate your conclusions.

Be aware of filling words. One speaker starts every sentence with “OK”, another with “So, OK, so…”, and another with “Basically,…”. One speaker fills every sentence with “like”, and another ends every sentence with “alright”. These filling words are naturally present in speech, but when they appear in every sentence, the speech becomes heavy and distracting. Avoiding them takes a lot of self-conscious effort, but it is doable.

Always leave ample time for Q&A. Questions are very important. Firstly, they help you gauge how well you presented—having many questions indicates that you have engaged the audience and triggered their curiosity. Secondly, questions offer you critics, feedback and new ideas, so make sure they happen.

These are my personal lessons I learned from observing others. This blog post is my self-reminder, but maybe it can help you along the way. Don’t take my word for it though, draw your own lessons from your own observations, and you’ll remember those much better. Have fun doing science and sharing science.

Footnotes:

1. Scientific Writing 2.0—A Reader and Writer’s Guide

2. Why do people blow the punchline in scientific talks? The destructive effect of acknowledgements slides

A question as a paper’s title

Yesterday, I came across a paper titled “What are the best covariates for predicting Y?”¹ Having a question as a title is tricky; sometimes it’s good, sometimes it isn’t. Joshua Schimel wrote an excellent guideline² on this topic. Based on that guideline, I would like to analyse this title in this post.

As I read this title, I imagined myself as a professor (my aspiration, after all). A student came up to me and asked the exact same question. I would think to myself, “Best in terms of what?” The question is not specific enough. It is certainly not possible to have a set of covariates that is the best in all situations. So, I would have to ask the students to be more specific; I might have to list several situations and say which set of covariates is generally considered best for each of these situations and why; and I must then conclude that this is the state-of-the-art knowledge at the moment, but when a new situation comes up, more research is needed.

When a question is asked in a paper’s title, the reader expects that the answer will be provided in the body of the paper. But in this case, most readers may react somewhat similarly to how I did. They may think that the paper had better qualify the claims specifically (as above). This means the the reader is prompted to be careful and skeptic. In other words, he knows that he will be disappointed because the original question will not be answered, but only a more specific one will be.

So, why not ask a more specific question from the beginning? From the abstract, it seemed that a more suitable question should be in which circumstance is which covariate good to use. That is what they did in the paper. They considered 6 covariates in 3 classes and tried different combinations and assessed goodness of fit. They concluded that one class of covariates was the best for one type of model, another the class for another type of model, and the third class was never the best. They did not give a best overall combination.

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Footnotes

1. Out of respect for the authors, I did not show the actual title, but a paraphase. Schimel also did this trick in his Writing Science book.
2. https://schimelwritingscience.wordpress.com/

Misconstrued actions

I have to begin my writing challenge with a rather sad story—one about a moment of social awkwardness I encountered today.

There was a series of presentations today by several PhD students. Before it started, I was asked by the programme coordinator to be the timekeeper for the talks. When it was about to start, the department head was absent, and one faculty member, I’ll call him A, agreed to be the chair. As the first talk went over its time limit and took up most of its Q&A time, A said that the speaker had a couple of minutes left. As I was keeping the time, I said that there was 5 minutes left for both presentation and Q&A. More than a minute later, when the presentation ended, I said there were three and a half minutes left, so we could have two questions. Faculty member B, sitting next to A, said “Now he wants to be the chair”, and A said something similar. I clarified that “I am the timekeeper.” When the first talk is over, A thanked the speaker. Another faculty member, C, said “Why are you thanking him, he [pointed towards me] should be thanking him.” The audience laughed.

Now, in retrospect, I think A was not very happy when I first clarified the time, and I think neither A, B nor C knew that I was the timekeeper. They thought I went over the line. Having had some time for recollection, I think I did. But that was not my intention. I was just clarifying things. I overdid it (I am always serious about what I do). My actions annoyed these people, and the actions were misconstrued as “trying to be the chair”, which was never my intention.

A commitment to writing

I set up this blog as a place to practice writing. Ironically, as I’m now writing my first paper, I have been neglecting this blog for a while. I thought I was already writing, so there was no need to practice writing. I now realize that such reasoning is flawed. Writing a paper is like running a marathon, it is a long and enduring process. When we train for a marathon, we don’t just run long distances. That is the core of the training, but we need to do more. We need to do interval training to beef up the cardio, we need to train different muscles to strengthen them individually, and so on. Similarly, practicing academic writing doesn’t mean just writing papers. I need to do a variety of other writings to flex up the writing muscles. That I am already writing my paper should not be an excuse to stop practicing.

Yesterday, I read about a business consultant who maintained a strict habit of writing every day. The result was that despite his busy schedules, he managed to publish two books. What’s more, the core content of the books came from his daily writings. I was inspired.

So, at this very moment, on a long bus ride home in a rainy evening, I commit myself to writing something every day. It could be this blog, my baby’s blog, my research journal or event in my little notebook if I don’t have any access to a computer. For now, I will keep this writing time flexible while trying to find a good routine. I’ve frequently heard and read that it is best to fix a time slot for writing, but it’s just not possible right now, and I don’t want to overwork myself.

In the spirit of deliberate practice, I will focus on one aspect of writing in each practice piece. The focus can be on conciseness, fluidity, story structure, etc. as I recently learned or am learning at the moment of writing.

This commitment is for a very long term. But as a baby-step start, let me challenge myself to do it for one whole week.

And the challenge starts now.