Writing scientific reports and articles is difficult. Too often, it is treated as a skill that can only be developed via repetition, feedback, and iteration. While practice and editing are two important components of learning to write technically, having a series of explicit principles laid out—guidelines, not rules, as Captain Barbossa of Pirates of the Caribbean is fond of saying—can be helpful, particularly for beginning writers. In this essay, I will introduce some of the starting points for technical writing and give some tips and tricks for beginners.

To begin, some definitions. An important definition is the idea of a “unit of discourse,” an idea I was first introduced to in Gopen & Swan’s inimitable 1990 article, The Science of Scientific Writing. Put simply, a unit of discourse is anything in a piece of writing that has a start and an end: a sentence, a paragraph, a subsection, a section, or the whole paper itself. Another definition is that of “the hourglass technique,” which refers in its most general and commonly used form to the idea of a paper as an hourglass, which goes from big picture (abstract/introduction) to “small picture” (methods/results) back to big picture (discussion/conclusions.)

From my previous sentence, you may have gleaned the answer to the question I posed in my title: a paper is like a fractal because it is composed of smaller and smaller parts that are essentially self-similar to the whole. You can zoom in or zoom out and ideally the form of the paper will still be that of an “hourglass.” How does this work in more concrete terms? Well – the paper itself has an abstract, giving you the big picture, and then it has sections that support the crude big picture in the abstract, and then it has conclusions, which bring back the big picture. But each section is like this as well, generally, at least in a full-blown paper: the section usually begins with an overview paragraph and then has subsections that go into greater detail, each of them providing support for the main point expressed in the overview. But each PARAGRAPH is like this as well! The first sentence of the paragraph should express the main point of that paragraph, then you should give details that support that point, then the final sentence should sum things up and maybe set you up logically for the following paragraph.

How can you put this into practice when you’re starting to do scientific writing? There are a few ways. First, if your brain is amenable to this sort of scaffolding work: creating an outline or skeleton can be helpful before you start filling in the full sentences. For example, you could fill out an hourglass template (see Fig. 1) for the paper, populate it with hourglass templates for each section, and populate those templates with hourglass templates for each paragraph. Alternately, if you’re the kind of person who works best with a stream-of-consciousness approach, you could use the template only for the whole paper and then keep it open beside you as you write out each section.

Figure 1. Hourglass template in an illustrative format. This template can be used to lay out any unit of discourse. The obligatory core should be found in any of them, regardless of whether your unit of discourse is a paragraph or an entire paper. The optional biggest picture points are used more commonly in whole-paper planning and in specific types of units, such as the abstract, the introduction, or a concluding paragraph.

As useful as it is for initial manuscript writing, the hourglass really shines in editing. Failure to follow the hourglass is a prime reason why papers can be hard to follow. It’s very easy to focus on all the details and forget to pull out the main points, because, when we’re doing the science, our day-to-day is mostly concerned with the details and with making certain all the details are correct. Keeping track of the details is very important, but using the hourglass will help the reader understand how those details fit together to make a coherent experiment and a coherent story.

Two good ways to use the hourglass when you’re editing are (i) see if you can fill out the hourglass template at each unit-of-discourse level with the draft after it’s been written and (ii) read through the “fat layers” of the hourglass at each level to diagnose issues. I would use the first technique particularly if you’re a “seat-of-the-pants” writer who didn’t start with a full outline. I recommend everyone use the second technique. To do this, highlight your title, your section titles, your subsection titles, and the first sentence of each paragraph. Reading only through those, ask yourself: does the story make sense? Don’t worry about whether it’s well-supported—after all, you’re ignoring the basic details that should support the point—can you understand what the author is trying to say? [RM4.1]Then, take note of places where the story doesn’t make sense—where there’s a contradiction, a logical gap, or just something that doesn’t feel quite right. For each of these “hiccups,” ask yourself whether the problem is that you have written your units of discourse in the wrong order, or whether the problem is that your big-picture description is really a detail and doesn’t properly convey the overall point that you wanted it to. This will tell you whether you should shake up your overall organization, write more informative big picture statements, or swap out your high-level piece of information for something that was left hidden in the details. As a note, lack of information in big picture statements is a particularly common problem in subsection headings, where people will write things like “Data Analysis” or “Analysis of Protein Behavior With X Tool” instead of telling the reader what they think the big takeaway should be, e.g. “Proteins Containing Charged Residues Are More Extended as Measured by Shape Parameter Analysis.”

At this point, I hope everyone shares my mental conception of a paper as a very wordy Sierpinski gasket. To summarize: every unit of discourse in your paper, from the whole thing right down to the individual paragraphs, should take the shape of an hourglass. You can use the hourglass motif to guide your initial writing, but it’s particularly effective if you apply it to diagnose structural issues when moving from a first draft to a second or subsequent draft. Go forth and create self-similarity!

References

Gopen, George D., and Judith A. Swan. “The science of scientific writing.” American scientist 78.6 (1990): 550-558.

https://writingcenter.uconn.edu/writing-in-biology-3/