Hello. Today, I'd like to talk to you about the Writing Process in the Natural Sciences, and I'm going to draw on my own experience as a writer and tell you a little bit about the challenges and, and opportunities that I have found as, as a writer in the natural sciences. As you recall, there are these five main Branches of the Natural Sciences but I am an interdisciplinary scientist. So again, I'm always thinking about my audience. And sometimes I write for very particular audiences like a group of restoration ecologists. And in that case, I have a pretty good understanding of what they already know, and how my work contributes to the, the larger body of work of restoration. But when I'm writing for a more interdisciplinary group, whether it be a group of conservation biologists, whether it be a group of environmental scientists, or of students. It's more for the public, then I really need to think about not just the language that I'm using but how I frame my questions and how I enter the conversation that has already been going on in my field. So there are several types of writing that I do and a lot of natural sciences do, and in the academic writing video, I talked a lot about the ac, the sort of more academic writing of research reports and the grant writing proposals. But again, I just wanted to, to note that a lot of us spend a fair amount of our time and energy thinking about research translation and this is where some of my most exciting work my work has come in. The writing process in the natural sciences mimics the research process. We spend a lot of our time in this sort of pre-writing thinking phase, drafting phase, from the very beginning of our research. So the scientific method requires us to start with the hypothesis and test the hypothesis, but before we're even ready to start asking questions, we need to learn about what has come before us, what is possible for us to ask, and how we might end up going about answering that question. So you can think of the pre-writing process as the pre-thinking process in the natural sciences, as really taking up the bulk of the time of the, the whole process. And it's one that can be iterative too. You might start with one hypotheses, find out somebody, or else has already tested it. You might start with a hypothesis and test it yourself. And find out that you don't have the, the methods worked out in order to fully, fully test that hypothesis. So there's a lot of reiteration that goes on in that process. But when it actually comes down to the writing, the methods and the result sections are usually the easiest to write. The methods are, you know, the recipe, the directions for how you did your study, and the results are the reporting of, of the results. What did you find, the facts of, of your experiments? The revising part of the process, as I mentioned before is happening even before you ask your question down. But when you finally have the, the full draft of your, of your work, you yourself will go through lots of revisions asking colleagues for their input. And you want to be very careful that you're presenting your results clearly and that you're interpreting them well. Because in reality, what most people do is read your abstract, skim through your methods and results, maybe look at a few tables and figures, and then get to that last paragraph of the paper where you're putting your results into a larger context. The peer review process, once you're finally finished with your draft is, is one that can take years. You submit your paper to an academic journal, to some other outlets, that if you're submitting a grant proposal to a funding agency. And that paper goes out for review by your colleague. And often you will get a whole lot of comments til you take into consideration, and those comments are not editing, editing by nature. They're mostly, challenging you on your actual hypothesis, on your methods, on your data analysis and your results, and can even give you some ideas for other sorts of literature that you should be citing in the context of your paper. So the peer review process sometimes will require you to go back to square one. Hopefully not, but in some cases that is what happens. Here's an example of a paper that I published that is a, a short communication. It's a note to my colleagues, to a fellow restoration ecologist, about an interesting result I found as a result of a study I did. It is 750 words beyond the abstract, so it is again very short, but it didn't start out that way. It started out as a full paper in that IMRAD format introduction methods results and discussion. But after a few rounds of peer review, my co-author and I realized that what we had to say was actually very straightforward and very focused. So we completely revised the paper into this short communication. The time from asking the question to having this come out was about seven years. So again, it's a very long process. It doesn't always have to be that long. Here's an up ad that I published last week as a result of going up to Washington DC for a climate rally. So I went up, I had the experience on Sunday and a few days later this was published in our local paper. This is an example of research translation. Where I had an idea that I wanted to present to this broader audience and I was using my experience and some interviews that I have done to, to support this, this idea and this argument. So, much shorter process, much different audience and a much different writing process. No matter what kind of writing we're doing in the natural sciences, what's most exciting to me is this idea of participating in a larger conversation. That we're not off in, in the corner, in the lab, in the field asking a question all by ourselves. Some people refer to this as we stand on the shoulders of giants. So, there has been quite a bit of work done in my own particular field, and that work inspires the way that I ask questions. It supports my results, sometimes, not always. It gives me ideas for methods and it allows me to interpret my results in a, sort of, a larger framework of restoration ecology. So you want to ask yourself some questions from the beginning of the writing process and certainly throughout the writing process. Questions like how does your writing fit into this larger conversation? Who's already at the table? Who's talking about these issues already? Where is the uncertainty? What are the things that people don't know and that you could possibly find out? So how can you contribute to this larger conversation? That's what's most exciting to me, and I hope you find it exciting too in your own writing process. Thanks.
