This is part three of a four part series on writing your first paper. For the first part in the series, click here, for the second part, click here.
Once you have written the first draft and handed it off to your mentor, the editing process begins. Depending on the personalities involved, this could be a very difficult time in the relationship between you and your mentor. Here are the perspectives (perhaps mantras?) that I try to maintain during the process.
It isn’t just your paper
After spending a lot of time working on the experiments, presenting lab meetings, and maybe even presenting a poster or giving a talk, you have come to think of the project as yours. It’s understandable, and perhaps even necessary to maintain the level of dedication required to bring many projects to fruition. With the edits of the first draft can come a hard truth – it isn’t just your paper. Your mentor thinks it is also, or even primarily, his or her paper. This isn’t an entirely unreasonable perspective, since in all likelihood the rest of your field will actually refer to the paper as “the new one out of Dr. Bigshot’s lab,” and your mentor will be held far more accountable for what is said and how it’s said than you will. Therefore, your mentor may have some very strong opinions on the exact wording of the manuscript.
Don’t take it personally
Everybody has their own way of saying something, and if your mentor has crossed your way out and written his or her way in, don’t take it as a personal criticism. It may well be that your phrasing was just fine, and they aren’t necessarily correcting what you wrote, but rather putting their own stamp on the manuscript. In this process you will discover that they have words they love to use, and words they hate to use. Over time, you’ll likely discover that you have similar lists of words.
In the last article in this series, I warned against spending a large amount of time and effort to fine tune a difficult passage in the first draft of a manuscript. Not only should you not do this because of time and effort considerations, but because spending that amount of time and effort makes you more invested in those areas of the manuscript. This makes changes or deletions of these sections much more frustrating to deal with.
In terms of a learning experience, one of the most difficult aspects of the editing process can be separating the changes due to stylistic differences from the changes made in the name of a more universal truth. Stylistic differences are just a matter of personal choice, and shouldn’t be taken too seriously, while the later changes are things you can learn from and use in the future. The easiest way to tell the difference is to go over the edits with your mentor. They will have a definitive reasons for the changes that you should probably learn something from while you’ll hear things like “I thought this sounded better” or “I just don’t care for that word” for the edits that come down to stylistic issues.
Sometimes things change
The line-editing isn’t necessarily the most frustrating element in the editing cycles. A number of times I’ve seen mentors get a manuscript full of experiments that they’ve seen over and over again, incorporated into a narrative that the student has discussed with them (and hopefully they approved of at the outline stage), and it wasn’t until they saw the whole package put together that they realized that they didn’t like the story. This can results in a major re-structuring of the manuscript, changing everything from the title on down. Sometimes it also means re-doing experiments to address subtly different questions than the original experiments addressed or including totally new experiments.
This can leave you with the feeling that a contract has been broken, and is usually expressed with sentences that begin “But you said that…” It undermines your confidence that the next version of the manuscript will be acceptable, as though you are trying to hit a moving target. I mean, you did everything they said to do with the first draft, and that wasn’t good enough, so why should you believe that doing what they say now will be acceptable either?
Now, I believe that this particular scenario happens less often with good mentors, who are engaged with their students and actively thinking about their projects long before it’s time to write the paper. But even with really good mentors, you have to realize that sometimes things change. Sometimes when everything is packaged together, you realize that you need one more experiment to prove the model you’ve put at the end of the paper. Or, after talking to a colleague at a meeting, your mentor thinks that the field would be more receptive to a closely related, but slightly different focus of the paper. There never was a contract between you and your mentor that said “I will do these ten experiments, and you must publish them without asking for any more.” Try to keep an open mind and see how the new requests will make the manuscript better.
You and your mentor are on the same side
In these situations, it’s critical to try to maintain a healthy perspective, like the one above. My own rule is to look at each change that’s made and ask “Is the new version incorrect or misleading in any way?” If the answer is no, then accept it. If it’s yes, then set it aside and discuss your concern with your mentor. Take big deep breaths when you need to, and set time aside in your schedule to do relaxing activities if things start getting under your skin. Look for the humor in the fact that in the second round of editing, your mentor is quite likely to re-edit their own work from the first round.
And remember each round of edits gets you closer to publishing your first paper, and each paper gets you closer to graduating.
Jode, from what I’ve heard from students, it’s often difficult to distinguish personal-style changes from changes that universally improve the paper. It may be that most students don’t ask their PI to explain them, but I think that many PIs may also confuse the two (since they’re more advanced in their careers, they must know how to write better). Do you have any other suggestions for how to determine the difference?
From a student’s perspective, the only guaranteed way to distinguish is to ask the PI why they suggested each change. However, there are often some clues about the difference between style and substance. Changes in style may change some words or rearrange the sentence, but the meaning of the sentence will be the same. These might include changing a ‘which’ to a ‘that’, or adding or removing commas, semicolons, etc (depending on the context, these can either be stylistic or necessary grammar changes). Changes designed to improve the substance of the paper will either add, remove, or alter the content of the paper such that the revised version says something slightly (or greatly) different from the original draft.
The nature of the PIs comment also determines the type of response needed from the student. Stylistic changes should be incorporated without question; in the end, the PI is the authority on how to say things. Content changes, however, should be carefully reviewed by the student to ensure that the change does not make the sentence or paragraph incorrect. Sometimes, even PIs make mistakes, so if the PI suggests a change that makes the statement no longer true, students have a responsibility to discuss this with the PI and come to an agreement over how to revise the section without creating errors.
Jessica,
I put a lot of thought into this, and in the short term a discussion of the changes with the PI is the only way I can think of to try to separate the two, although I wouldn’t go as far as Matt and guarantee that even this would be successful. If the mentor tends to have a less-than-nurturing personality, the conversation may not happen, or if it does it could be traumatizing to a student. As you suggested, the mentor may not even be able to explain some of the edits unless they have some background in writing, or they may present personal preferences as though they are rules. (eg – Scientific papers should always be written in the third-person passive voice.) In these situations the student can try to solicit the help of an experienced third party, if they can find an accomplished writer who is willing to “interpret” the edits without breaking out their own red pen.
In the long term, the best way to recognize these differences independent of the mentor is for the student to become a trained writer in their own right. If the student can train themselves, either through organized coursework or pursuing the subject independently, then they will recognize the differences between a trivial stylistic change and one that improves the clarity of the manuscript. I know that what I’m saying isn’t popular – every student I’ve ever suggested this to rolled their eyes and seemingly purged the thought from their head as quickly as possible. However, if you think about it, expecting your PI to sharpen your writing skills through a couple of manuscript revisions is like expecting your English professor to teach you physics by grading your essay on an Isaac Asimov novel. If you want to know how to do something well, then go to the people who truly understand it and have them teach you.
I apologize if I haven’t helped. Since you already assist scientists with their writing, I don’t think I’m saying anything you don’t already know. However, the nature of PI-grad student relationships are so variable that it makes it difficult to give specific advice that is broadly applicable.
Thanks so much for your replies! Sorry to respond just now; I had some issues logging in until recently.
I am now planning a panel discussion on this topic (how PIs teach their grad students and postdocs how to write scientific papers and grant
proposals, and possibly also how trainees can learn how to write these
from their PIs). I will definitely ask how beginning writers should distinguish changes that correct the content or clarify the message from those that make the style match the PI’s (your answer is probably as good as any I’ll get from senior faculty, but hopefully it will get the panel and audience thinking about the issue). I’m not sure yet what other questions I’ll ask– any suggestions?