So in this next module, we're gonna talk about the prewriting step.
This is the step where you get organized and get all your information at your
fingertips. So, the pre-writing step is all about
getting organized. So I'm gonna try to get you out of the
habit of trying to write and gather information simultaneously.
So I already talked a little bit about this before.
But I love to tell the story about when I was a graduate student.
So whenever I was working on a manuscript as a graduate student.
If you walked into my office, you would see that my office was kind of blanketed
with papers. So there'd be like, three papers on the
printer, two on the filing cabinet, three spread out on the floor beneath, behind my
chair. A couple of papers spread out under my
desk, a couple of papers spread out over, over my desk.
You know, there'd just be sort of papers everywhere, and I'd have a good sense of
where each paper was located. Right?
I could find it and, you know, God forbid, that anybody come in and, you know,
rearrange my papers, 'cause I kinda knew where they all were.
And, my writing process will look something like this.
So. I'm gonna into, okay, I'm gonna write my
discussion, I'm about two sentences down into the discussion.
And now I need to get a piece of information from that clinical trial by
Jones, et. Al.
Hah, where's that paper? Yup, that paper is on top of the filing
cabinet. Okay, pull the paper down, rifle through
it. Oh, look at that, I already highlighted
that sec. Great.
So I got that fact now but I put the paper back carefully where I got it from, now
I'm going to type that piece of information into my paper.
And it would be this really long drawn out process, notice how I wasn't doing any
writing in that whole step, I was just kind of looking for information.
Now I've dated myself a little bit because I realize that people don't use hard
copies anymore but there is a digital equivalent to this where you're toggling
between Google and Pugman and email and whatever else to gather your information.
So, as I said before it's just a really, really painful way to write.
I used to procrastinate writing when I was a graduate student.
I really dreaded having to go in to write because it was this long, drawn-out
process. So I'd go on these long bike rides and
things. You can do that when you're a grad
student, you have more time. So, the idea is, though, that eventually,
as I, got more serious about writing, I evolved a process that is a much better,
more efficient way to write. And I'm gonna talk a little bit about that
process, But you wanna get organized first.
So you wanna get all of your information, Organize it and have it at your fingertips
before you sit down to write the first draft.
What that looks like for me is the following.
And you're each going to have to come up with your own system that works well for
you. But my system is something like this now.
I, and when I get a manuscript, you know, I, I'm kind of collecting manuscripts.
As I get manuscripts and I find them, I'll kind of skim through them, read through
them. As I'm reading through them, I'll figure
out, you know, exactly what facts, and information and, and statements I think
are important. And that I'm going to be referencing in my
manuscript. Or, if I, you know, it doesn't even have
to be a manuscript, if I'm, sometimes, you know, writing pieces.
So, I will take that piece of information and immediately put it into an ongoing
Word document, a single Word document. So I'll just, you know say, okay this is
the %, percentage, this is the statistic found, I'll put the reference.
So I'll gather than piece of information, put it in my little ongoing Word document
with the reference. Then I'll take that paper and I'll kind of
have a sense where that paper, you know fits in, I'll categorize it in some way.
So if I'm doing, looking at you know clinical trials versus observational
studies, I might write on the top of this is, you know clinical trials one.
And then I'm gonna put it in a manila folder, either, you know, a real manila
folder or an electronic one. That's the manila folder that has all of
the clinical trials. So I have an organizational way that I can
easily get back to and find that paper if I need it.
In an ideal situation I actually never end up needing to go back to that paper
except, you know, a few papers I have to go back to. But for the most part, I've
already got the information out that I need.
So, I gather all of that information, as I'm reading papers.
I file those papers in a nice organized way, and I get this document going, where,
this is my organizational. So I get this document going where I've
got all the facts and figures that I'm gonna use.
And it starts as just this long, long Word document with a whole bunch of facts and
pieces of information in it. So that's my organizational system.
That's how I kinda organize my thoughts. Then, what I do.
To organize all my thoughts for my paper is I start cutting and pasting in that,
what I call a road map, it isn't really an outline, but I call it, you know, a road
map. All of those pieces of information, after
I've gone through and I've got them all, you know, this long Word document.
I'll just going to go through it and rearrange them.
So all the facts that are put into a particular section of my manuscript or my
article I'm gonna kind of cut and paste them so all those facts are together.
So that when I sit down to write my paper I know that, you know, in this section of
the paper, I'm gonna be talking about this particular, thought, this particular idea,
and I'm gonna call the facts that are relevant to that right there with all the
citations, so it's right at my finger tips.
So that's kind of my organizational system.
So I wanna ask you the question. Do you have an organizational system?
Hopefully, it's something better than having papers strewn about your office.
If you don't have a good organizational system, then create one that suits you.
And you're gonna kind of, it's very individual, what people like for their
organizational system. But, but spend some time.
Thinking about how you can get yourself organized.
A lot of people feel like it's a waste of time to spend time organizing, but it's
not. It is, it will save you so, so much time
down the road if you have an efficient system for organizing your thoughts ahead
of time. So think about that.
If you don't have a good organizational system now.
Maybe you already have one that works for you, but if you don't, try to come up with
one. Then again, I've told you a little bit
about my system. If you spend more time organizing before
you start writing, your writing will be less painful.
You'll spend less time in that step that's really hard, which is the composing prose
step. So, and what you write will come out to be
much, much more organized. So you wanna develop some kind of roadmap.
And, you know, again, I use the term roadmap as opposed to outline.
It's kinda like an outline, but it doesn't have A, B, C, one, two, three.
Again, for me, it's just simply a list of facts and figures and information with
citations that I move around so that I put all of the pertinent information in, you
know, the same place on the Word document. And I think in paragraphs and sections, so
I think. I've thought out.
Before I sat down to write, well, I know this section of my article or my paper is
going to be about X and Y. So I have all the information pertinent to
X and Y in that. Key part of the Word document, so again,
it's all in one place when I sit down to write.
And you also might think in paragraphs and what's gonna go in each paragraph,
roughly. I usually kind of leave it to sections, I
don't get quite as detailed as down to the paragraph level, but if it's helpful you
could even go down to the paragraph level. So I'm going to give you an actually, to
show you an example of one of my road maps.
I took a screen shot and it's going to show you what a road map looks like for
me. Notice that my Word document is here and
we're at page 33. This probably, this Word document is
probably 60 pages long. I'm just throwing things into the Word
document as they come along, I'm not going to end up using it, it all in the end of
the day. But when I rearrange it and put it all in
the right bins, I'll at least know all the information I have.
A lot of it won't actually make it in my article, but it will be the background for
my article. So I was recently writing an article about
how biostatistics is a hot field right now.
That was a particularly enjoyable article for me to write, since the other thing I
teach at Stanford, besides writing, is I teach statistics.
Specifically biostatistics. So I knew I was going to have a section in
that article that was going, it was a little historical, , it was going back
into the 1920's up to the 1970's, and talking about some of the histories of
bio-statistics. So, when I, when I'm doing a story.
Like this was a feature story, so I actually was able to use quotes.
I interviewed people, and I had a lot of quotes, so a lot of what was in my roadmap
was just quotes that, from people that I talked to.
So I have all these quotes that I knew I wanted to go in that section.
Some of them I highlighted'cuz I was sure that they were gonna make it in, and
indeed, a couple of these quotes actually did make it into the final article, so,
This is Brad Efron talking, and he says, people blundered around for 2,000 years
trying to decide whether A was better than B.
That was a great quote, that made it in the article, and, and, that it had layers,
had the general attitude that you ought to be quantitative and comparative in your
thinking and medicine. It's a very powerful idea.
Isn't natural to doctors. Or at least it wasn't from the Greeks, on
into about, 1930s. So both of those quotes actually ended up
in my article, in this section of the article.
And, then, there was, I was gonna give some specific examples, some specific
people, and I. Put all the details about, there was a
specific example of, a radiologist working on transforming Hodgkin's disease into a
curable disease, so there were some details around that example that I wanted
to have at my fingertips. The names of the people involved, the
dates, so I put all of that there. And that all became that section of the,
of the story. And so, in fact, when I sat down to write
that section, it went. I wrote it like that.
It was very quick. Because I already knew what was going in
that section, it was just a matter of putting it into prose.
So this is a way you can really make your writing more efficient.
Now, another thing that I like to talk about, in terms of the pre-writing step.
So one is just gathering all your information, organizing your ideas.
Getting some kind of crude outline or road map.
Another thing you can be doing during the pre-writing step, actually you can be
doing throughout the writing process, but in particular in the pre-writing step is,
is doing some brainstorming and some thinking about your piece away from the
computer. When you sit at the blank word document,
you sit at the computer, it's a little bit confining.
It's a little bit, you know, angst, producing.
And sometimes you don't get your best ideas when you're kinda forcing yourself
to sit at the computer. So sometimes your best ideas can come when
you're kinda brainstorming away from the computer.
So, here's something that I like to do. I'm a, a busy person, so I need to be very
efficient with my time. So I do a lot of writing, or, more like
pre-writing, when I've got some extra time to kill.
So, we're, when I'm trying to multitask. So, I'll do a lot of writing, or
pre-writing, in my head when I'm exercising.
And that looks like, you know. I'll work through some ideas for the
piece. I will, you know.
Think about how it's going to be structured.
I'll think about what the, what the main, take-home messages are.
You can work a lot of that out while you're exercising.
It's really great because, when you're exercising, your brain kind of just
wanders. And it just gives you an opportunity to
you know, make some new connections, come up with new, cool ideas.
Sometimes I come up with. My most memorable lines or a really good
word that I know I'm gonna end up using in my piece, well, I'm, it just kind of comes
to me. So I was doing a feature story and I was
thinking through this one scientist how he had fallen into this research area, and I
thought, oh, the word serendipity, that's just a perfect way to describe it.
So that word ended up in my piece, and if I quote my editor with editing that piece,
he actually picked up on that word and said, oh, that's a great way to put it.
Why don't you, kind of, frame that whole paragraph around serendipity?
So that word turned out to be very powerful.
So you can kind of do some of this while you're exercising.
You can if you're driving alone, if you're commuting, turn off, you know, NPR, your
radio, whatever you listen to and you can brainstorm a lot of ideas while you're
driving. I do a lot of brainstorming in the car.
Of course, don't try to write it down while you're driving, just do it in your
head. When you get home, then write it down.
So that's a good way to think through things, because again, your brain kind of
just wanders while you're driving. It gives you a chance to kind of make some
connections. .
While you're waiting in line, put down the magazine, or the iPod, and that's a good
time, to, you know, you've got some extra time, just let your mind kind of.
Think over. The piece you are working on or about to
work on and so, for example, this week I had an appointment and I you know, was
waiting for about three minutes for my appointment.
And As I was sitting there my mind was kind of chewing over this feature story
I'm working on, on validation. And I suddenly, it just came to me what
the crux of that story is. So, I, you know, rifled around in my
purse, found a little piece, scrap of paper and started, you know, scribbling
notes. Because I got what the crux of that story
is. And that never would have come to me if
had I been just sitting there at the computer waiting for it to come to me.
So, write on the go. Spend some time away from the computer.
You can do things, again, like workout take-home messages.
You can organize your paper. Kind of figure out the structure and the
flow of your paper. And again, you can sometimes write memor-,
whole memorable lines of, of prose. Some of my best lines have come when I was
writing on the go like this. And, in fact, Sometimes I've written
entire very, very short pieces, You know, five or six sentences long, 100
150 words. I've written entire lines while I was you
know, swimming laps. I've come up with the whole thing.
Then you know, I had to go back home and quickly write it down.
So it's, it's a really fun way to write. It's much more enjoyable than sitting at
the computer. It's a good way, especially for the pre
writing step. And then, finally when you're thinking
about prewriting. Again, it's all about organization.
So, I wanna give you, we've talked about how to organize with interparagraph, I
also want to measure just kinda how you might approach laying out the organization
of your entire piece, your entire paper. So one thing to keep in mind, this seems
obvious, but it often isn't obvious when I'm reading papers, is that like ideas
should be grouped. So if you've got multiple paragraphs
talking about the same thing, they either should be all collapsed into a single
paragraph, or at least the paragraph should be a budding one should be close
together. So, group like ideas,
Group like paragraphs. So paragraphs, again, are talking about
similar things. I, it's, it's often the case when I'm
editing things that I'll, you know, be reading through a discussion section.
Two paragraphs in, they're talking about a topic.
Then I get to paragraph seven and they're talking about the same topic.
They've come back to it and really those two ideas, I guess, need to be brought
together. So keep like ideas together.
A little tip I can give you about discussing controversies, which often is
what you're discussing in scientific articles, is be careful about what I call
baiting and switching your reader. Don't do that too many times.
So, often when we're discussing a controversy, you'll have like, an
arguement, a counter arguement and a, and a, a rebuttal.
And a typical way people will frame that is that there may be multiple arguments
and multiple counterarguments and multiple rebuttals.
People will want to say, you know, here's argument A, here's the counter argument to
argument A, here's the rebuttal to that counter argument and then me start the
whole sequence again for B and let me start the whole sequence again for C.
And actually that ends up being much harder on the reader because you're going
back and forth. Pro and con, pro and con too many times.
And that becomes very confusing for the reader.
So a better way to organize those kinds of discussions is to put all of the pro
arguments first, then all of the counterarguments, then all the rebuttals.
So A, B, and C, then the counter arguments to A, B, and C, and then the rebuttals to
all of those. So that ends up being a little bit easier
on your reader. So try to avoid, you know, switching on
your reader too many times. The preceding program is copywrited by the
board of trustees of The Leland Stanford Junior University.
Please visit us at med.stanford.edu.