Right your Writing

By Bob Grant Right your Writing How to sharpen your writing and make your manuscripts more engaging. © Printstock / CSA Images / Corbis When Judith Swan was a PhD student in molecular and cell biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), her research on specialized microtubules in chicken cells went pretty smoothly. But despite expert guidance and advice from her advisor, “when it came time to write, nobody had

Written byBob Grant
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When Judith Swan was a PhD student in molecular and cell biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), her research on specialized microtubules in chicken cells went pretty smoothly. But despite expert guidance and advice from her advisor, “when it came time to write, nobody had very much to say,” Swan recalls. Swan was essentially told to write up her research, then was edited, critiqued, and told to try again. “We teach writing by stochastic processes—the random walk,” she says.

After finishing her PhD at MIT, Swan made her way to Duke University, where she attended a workshop on improving scientific writing presented by the linguist George Gopen. “Oh my goodness,” Swan recalls thinking, impressed by how Gopen and his colleagues talked about effective writing in science. “This is an amazing language.” She was soon engrossed in an “informal postdoc” with Gopen to pick up on his perspective.

She ...

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Meet the Author

  • From 2017 to 2022, Bob Grant was Editor in Chief of The Scientist, where he started in 2007 as a Staff Writer. Before joining the team, he worked as a reporter at Audubon and earned a master’s degree in science journalism from New York University. In his previous life, he pursued a career in science, getting a bachelor’s degree in wildlife biology from Montana State University and a master’s degree in marine biology from the College of Charleston in South Carolina. Bob edited Reading Frames and other sections of the magazine.

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