“The driving force behind science writing is that we want to tell stories. To map out my story, I often start with writing the abstract part of the paper. You don’t have to limit it to 250 words, but starting with an abstract forces you to really think about what you want to write: why you are doing these experiments, why are they important, why would people want to know this, what approach did you take, what are your main results, and what conclusions will excite people most? Often, the story is not yet complete when I start writing, but I like to do that because it makes me realize, wait a minute, we need to do some additional experiments! Because one can package a story in different ways with the same set of data, trying different versions of an extended abstract seems like a good first step in writing a paper as well as guiding the rest of a project to completion.”
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“The driving force behind science writing is that we want to tell stories. To map out my story, I often start with writing the abstract part of the paper. You don’t have to limit it to 250 words, but starting with an abstract forces you to really think about what you want to write: why you are doing these experiments, why are they important, why would people want to know this, what approach did you take, what are your main results, and what conclusions will excite people most? Often, the story is not yet complete when I start writing, but I like to do that because it makes me realize, wait a minute, we need to do some additional experiments! Because one can package a story in different ways with the same set of data, trying different versions of an extended abstract seems like a good first step in writing a paper as well as guiding the rest of a project to completion.”
