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 ...
