Scientific Writing Knowledge Hub

Effective writing (+common mistakes)

3 min read

What does the scientific writing process look like?

The academic writing process is the steps that you take to move from ideas and data to a polished draft. In short, it’s these five steps:

  1. Researching: Asking questions, designing experiments, collecting information.
  2. Thinking: Making sense of all the information, answering questions.
  3. Planning: Deciding what to write (for a specific audience), outlining.
  4. Drafting: Writing the draft.
  5. Revising: Gathering feedback and making changes to improve, edit, and polish the draft.

The nature of academic writing is iterative. Once you’ve finished the first four steps, you’ll go through them again, to a lesser extent, during the revising step. For example, you may need to read additional literature, revise an argument, or change the structure of your draft.

Why you to structure your writing process

Following a structured writing process helps you to write a focused and coherent draft. Without an organised process, it’s easy to get lost.

Common pitfall: skipping steps

Novice writer’s often skip parts of the writing process and jump straight into drafting. While understandable (since we tend to speak about ‘writing up’), this can lead to common roadblocks such as:

  • Boring, repetitive Discussion (e.g. skipped part of researching + thinking: research questions and answers unclear)
  • Introduction that lacks flow (e.g. skipped planning: unclear what audience you’re writing for, makes it hard to write a relevant intro)
  • Feeling uncertain about validity of the research *(e.g. skipped part of research: justification for the methods unclear, hard to trust the data)
  • Writing goes incredibly slow (e.g. trying to revise or edit while drafting)
  • And often, stress 😟

So, to develop your draft efficiently, following the steps in right order helps a ton.

Awareness is key

Following the writing process isn’t about carrying out each step to perfection. It’s about being aware of the different tasks that you’re carrying out, and where they fit into the bigger process. This can be challenging, because all steps look the same: sitting at desk and staring at your screen. The trick is to start recognising and being aware of them.

Now, that is easier said than done. How can you know what step you’re (supposed to be) carrying out, if you’ve never done this before? Here’s some short advice:

  • Set a goal: Before you start working, ask yourself (1) what do I want to achieve, and (2) what step does this activity most likely belong to? Being doing this consistently, you’ll start becoming more aware of the different tasks in your writing process.

  • Use the right mindset: Have a look at short article by English professor Betty. S Flowers from 19811. In it, she explains four different roles and how you can apply them during the writing process2.

  • Take a course: Enrol in a course that teaches you how to write. Make sure that this course actually focuses on teaching the writing process, not just e.g. academic language or the what a finished journal article should look like. You can find my own course here.

Footnotes

  1. Flowers, B.S. (1981) ‘Madman, Architect, Carpenter, Judge: Roles and the Writing Process’, Language Arts, 58(7,), pp. 834–836. ↩

  2. Here, I would apply madman to thinking, architect to planning, carpenter to drafting, and judge to revising. ↩

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