So, in this next module we are going to talk about the writing steps.
So, this is the step you are writing the first draft of your piece.
And again, as I said, this tends to be the hardest step for most people.
This is where you pop open the blank Word document and you have got to start
writing. Or, hopefully you are popping up some kind
of road map so you have something to start with.
So, some tips for the first draft. So, my biggest tip for the first draft is
don't be a perfectionist. A lot of scientists are perfectionists,
and they want to get it right on the first try.
But writing is not the place to be a perfectionist, especially writing the
first draft. The goal of the first draft, when I write
a first draft, this is my goal, it's to get done my ideas in complete sentences in
order. And that's it.
So, they don't have to sound good. They have to be complete sentences, that's
my, that's the bar I set for myself. So that's the goal of the first draft,
really, is just to get your ideas down in an organized and logical fashion.
In complete sentences, so that you're actually composing some prose in that kind
of nice order, in that organized order. In,
You want to really focus on the. Ideas.
The high level ideas. The big picture.
The take home message. The logical organization.
You want to focus on those in the first draft, so that eventually your piece is
well organized and has clear take home messages.
Cuz that's a lot more important than those sentence level details.
The sentence level details, you can fix that on revision.
So kind of all these things we've been talking about in the last couple of
lectures, getting rid of unnecessary clutter, using better verbs.
You can fix all of that on revision now that you have the right tools to do that.
So on a first draft, make sure you're getting everything down in a logical,
organized way. And that's the main goal.
Because it's easier to fix the sentence level details during revisions than it is
to fix things like logical organization. If you're logical organization is off,
you'll end up having to revise the whole piece and that revision process is so
much, so much harder. Sentence level editing, that's fairly
easy, in comparison. And again, the other reason, the other
argument for writing the first draft quickly is the hardest step for most
people. So minimize the pain by writing the first
draft quickly and efficiently. And as I'd mentioned, in an earlier
module, you know, Spend only about ten%, a small fraction of
your time, your whole time for writing the manuscript on that writing the first draft
step. I can whip out a first draft fairly
quickly because one, I'm ready to write. I've got my prewriting stuff done.
And two, I'm not editing myself as I go along.
I know that the editing and the elegance in the writing can happen on revision.
So that's my tip for you for writing the first draft.
And some of you may not write like that, but I want you to try it because it
really, really, really makes your life easier and really makes your writing much
more efficient and it also comes out better.
So I thought it'd be fun to share with you some examples of first draft writing that
I've pulled out of my own work. So I went through my files and found some
first drafts that I had done and I picked out some paragraphs just to share with
you. Just to kinda show you what, what comes
out on a first draft. So this was a short paragraph, but here's
a short paragraph that I wrote, written on a first draft.
It said errors in publication occur when the authors have typos, omissions or such
poor writing in the methods that others cannot figure out what they did or
reproduce their table's or figure's. Non of that cuz I had a long complex
sentence. Sometimes there's just to much to write up
that errors will occur in almost every case.
Okay. Notice that's not the most elegant sentence you ever read, neither of those
is, is particularly elegant. Like I told you don't use there is.
I've got my there is right in that second sentence.
Sometimes there is, right. It's not terribly elegant but I've got
down the crooks of what I was trying to say.
This is what this paragraph's going to be about.
This is the details that I want to get across.
These are the examples typo omissions for writing that I want to mention.
So, so that was my first draft okay. So you can see it's not great I just get
my ideas down, let them flow. Notice that I, I held myself to complete
sentences. So, let me show you the revised version.
So, I went back and revised it and here is what I came up with in the revision.
Published papers frequently have typos, omissions and otherwise poor
documentational methods. These errors make it impossible to figure
out exactly what was done, or to reproduce the results.
So you could see that, that very much resembles the first draft, except it's
much more clear and concise. It's much more to the point.
I dropped out a whole idea about that there's just too much to write up because
actually I had somebody who I had a quote from, who was saying that exact thing in
another paragraph so I didn't need the repetition.
So here's another example again for my own writing that I'm going to share with you,
you know what my first drafts look like so Here it is.
This was kind of a long paragraph. This was from a story that was talking
about archaic genes being found in people and this paragraph was giving some
potential speculative implications of having archaic DNA in your genetic
make-up. So,
Notice again, it's just it's just very first-drafty.
So, the finding of these HLA alleles may have some practical applications as well.
Now we all divide up into those who carry archaic DNA, and those who don't.
A potential implication is, notice my use of a boring verb there,
Is that people who carry archaic HLAs could be more prone to autoimmunity.
Autoimmunity is associated with HLA factors.
There could be downsides to archaic HLAs. Now, this is very boring writing.
Since we have evolved separately from Neanderthals, notice my typo there, for a
few hundred thousand years, We may have evolved important differences
in the proteins that interact with HLA. The archaic HLAs may interact more poorly
with some of these proteins, potentially causing mistakes like autoimmunity.
And then I've got a quote at the end. All this speculation, but we have been
apart for all this time, so it would be very surprising if there weren't
differences, Parhm says it would solve the long
standing puzzle. So notice I've done a lot of, I've got in
that paragraph all the things I want to get out.
All the ideas that I want to make in this paragraph.
But some of the writing is not very good. It's a there is, I don't know maybe it's
this, there could be, it's very boring and it's unnecessarily wordly.
It's got typos. But I just got it all down, in complete
sentences. Now, here's my revised version.
This may have gone through me looking back at it once or even twice.
So, Neanderthal or Denisova, that's the archaic part, proteins continue to live on
and function in sciences. And this may also have a downside for our
notes. Neanderthals evolved separately from us
for a few hundred thousand years so their proteins may be somewhat mismatched to our
immune system. It could play a role in auto immune
disease. Auto immunity is poorly understood but
known to be related to HLA types and that would get a quote.
So notice that, that second paragraph, it's got all the same ideas but it's much
more succinct and elegant than the first paragraph.
It didn't start that way, it evolved into that through revision, that's me editing
my own work. Alright, so one more example from my own
work. So this was a paragraph from the lead of a
story. And it didn't read too bad on the first
draft, but I'll show you what happens on revision.
So it says, it's also difficult to study the biology because the brain is so
inaccessible. Notice the, it is, that I've started with?
I've told you not to use it is or there is.
Cancer scientists can take out a tumor and look directly at the cells, but autism
researchers cannot directly study brain cells, except on autopsy, let alone
developing brain cells. Stanford is on the cutting edge of solving
this problem. In fact, Dolmetsch's solution is so
innovative, it seems straight out of a science fiction novel.
I got that little cute thing about science fiction novel on the end.
It's got some nice pieces to it, but. It's not great.
Right? I've got really boring verbs, it's a
little wordy. Okay.
So then I went back, and I. On.
That was my first draft, and I went back and revised it.
It's also difficult to access the brain. Notice I still don't get rid of the it is.
It's also difficult to access the brain. Scientists can slice cancer cells out of a
tumor and directly study them but they can't just scoop cells out of the brain,
let alone the developing brain. Stanford is on the cutting edge of solving
this problem. In fact, Dolmetsch's solutions seem
straight out of a science fiction novel. So notice that, that I got some great
verbs in there slice and scoop and I cut some extra words.
So now its much more succinct and its even a little better.
Okay, now I'm gonna show you one more version, cuz that's not the last version
of this. Because that's the version that I sent to
my editor. My editor revised it even a little bit
more. So here's the revised version that
actually got printed. Another impediment:
Access to the brain. You'll notice he used the colon there.
Scientists can slice cancer cells out of a tumor and study them directly, but they
can't just scoop cells out of the brain. Stanford is on the forefront of solving
this problem, in fact, so that's a solution seen straight out of a science
fiction novel. So, you can see that's even more clear and
even more elegant. This went through multiple rounds of
revision to get that way. It didn't start that way.
So, it's okay, on a first draft, to have, you know, to violate some of these rules
I've been talking about with good writing. You can fix all of that later.
As long as your ideas are clearly laid out and you know what you want to go in each
paragraph, that sentence-level editing that can happen after you've written the
first draft. That can happen during revision.
The preceding program is copyrighted by the board of trustees, of the Lela
Standford Junior University. Please visit us at med.stanford.edu.