Writing Guide

The goal of this writing guide is to make writing more straightforward.

• Additional resources
  • Big picture resources
  • Getting into the finer details
• Points of style
  • Specific and nonspecific subjects
  • Hyphenation
  • Numbers in text
  • How to write gene and protein names?
  • References
• Guiding principles
  • Tips
  • Outline
  • Active Voice
  • Editing and revising

What is a paper?

A paper is NOT a summary of your work. A paper is a series of claims that support one big message or claim. The subclaims should generally break down around figure. Each figure supports one subclaim figure to build a coherent narrative. Putatuively, your reviewers and readers are looking at the logical flow and support of your claims. Thus, to efficiently write an interesting and engaging paper, you will not write linearly with respect to time or series of experiments. You write the paper to most clearly and robustly support your main message.

Determining how to most efficiently and effectively structure a paper requires iteration. You are unlikely to start with the optimal structure because you should NOT start when you have all the data. As you collect data, you will need to revise your paper to best integrate that new information into the bigger message. New data may also entirely redirect the main message. This is the normal correction that science allows. Writing is iterative, so if you don’t start somewhere you will never get anyway. Start early, revise often, iterate.

Estimated time

hours, days, weeks, months, years…