Writing paragraphs and stringing them together

This post is about structuring a paragraph, and about stringing paragraphs together. I’ve written about the overall structure of a scientific paper in my previous post, but I’ve noticed that many people put very little thought into structuring the text within their paragraphs. Because we’re never really taught this! And as a result, paragraphs can feel disjointed, unfinished, and sometimes even chaotic! So, how do you structure a paragraph and make it easy – enjoyable even! – to read, how do you make sure the reader gets your point, and how do you make sure the flow of your paragraphs is logical and coherent?

I like to start a paragraph with the most important sentence. See, I just did that. That first sentence? That should make the point you want the reader to remember. Once you’ve made that point, you can explain it in a bit more detail in the rest of the paragraph. Why is it so important to make the most important statement in the first sentence? Because the attention of the reader will fade as they read on, but they do want to read on to learn about the point that you’ve just made. So, explain it, give a few examples, or maybe even insert a contradiction – something that does not support what you just said. And once you’ve done that, you need a transition to the next paragraph. Really, like a teaser to make the reader curious about what you’re going to write about next. That contradiction that I just suggested? That’s the ideal transition to the next paragraph.

Why did I suggest inserting a contradiction? Well, because sometimes it works differently! Sometimes, you can make your point in the second sentence (and I just did that!). It can become very repetitive – boring – if every paragraph looks the same and follows the same format. And scientific writing is not just about getting the message across, I think it should also be about writing something that’s a joy to read. You can try different formats, and sentences and paragraphs of different length. You can insert commas, brackets, semicolons, m-dashes – anything to make the text a bit more playful and break up long sentences! Really, within that rather rigid format for scientific papers, you can be creative. 

The key ingredients of an academic paper

It’s writing season!! Or at least, it seems to be in my group.

Writing is not easy. I LOVE writing, but this is after many years of trying, doing, getting feedback, rewriting, and getting more feedback. Bizarrely, I was never taught how to write, and I have the impression that it’s still not generally taught very well, because a lot of students hate writing, and because of the common – but easy to avoid – mistakes that they make.

There are a lot of fantastic resources on how to write well. I have Josh Schimel’s as well as Stephen Heard’s books on my bookshelf, and I recommend my students to read this useful post on Dynamic Ecology, and the British Ecological Society’s guide to scientific writing.

But I still feel that while these resources are very good, they might be too lengthy or too detailed for some of my students, and I end up explaining the most important ingredients of a good article or thesis again and again.

(OK, so this post turned out to be quite lengthy, but you can just skip it and jump to the pictures.)

When reading through a few student papers, it suddenly dawned on me that what I really need is not a lengthy or detailed explanation of how to write an article, but a brief and intuitive overview that shows the key ingredients, and the links between them, at a glance (similar to this graphic that I made about the ingredients for a proposal). Because yes, writing gets easier the more often you do it, but it is also crucial to know the ‘recipe’ of what makes a good introduction and discussion. And yes, also what makes a good methods and results section.

So, I made the following overview of what are, in my opinion, the key paragraphs in the introduction and discussion of a scientific paper or thesis, and the links between them. I also made one for the methods and results sections – this one is less prescriptive, but it does include some important do’s and don’ts, and there are some links between these two sections – for example, I like to structure my results roughly similar to my methods section. 

Are women with kids struggling more under lockdown?

Let’s be clear about this: a lot of people are struggling during these trying times, and for a variety of reasons. Many people worry about the health and wellbeing of themselves or their loved ones, about keeping their jobs, and about paying their bills.

I have a permanent position in academia, which means that I am in the very fortunate position of not having to worry about losing my job. Universities might be hit in the long term, but there are little immediate consequences of the corona crisis for their economic viability.

But academia is infamous for its high workload. A recent survey under Dutch academics indicated that they work on average 36% more than their contractual hours a week. It’s also known for its persistent bias against women. Only 23% of Dutch full professors are female (not to speak of women of colour!). In addition, there is a motherhood penalty: women who have children are disadvantaged in their career even more than those that don’t have children, while men that have children are not disadvantaged at all.

Why are Dutch farmers and builders angry and why have I started tweeting in Dutch? The Dutch nitrogen crisis.

You might have seen it in the news: Dutch farmers ravaging cities with their tractors. But this week also builders, contractors, dredgers, and gardeners have protested in The Hague, where our government is based. They are angry, because a lot of their activities and projects have been halted, and farmers in the vicinity of protected natural (Natura 2000) areas might have to move or be bought out.

Why? Because of the Programma Aanpak Stikstof (PAS), a programme designed to reduce nitrogen deposition in Natura 2000 (a European network of protected natural areas) areas while still allowing economic growth and development. Cleverly, this programme allowed nitrogen-emitting activities in the vicinity of these areas if there were planned compensating measures to reduce future emissions, as well as future measures to reduce the degradation of Natura 2000 areas. So, essentially, taking a mortgage on future compensating measures. But on the 29^thof May 2019, the Council of State judged that the PAS could no longer be used to allow nitrogen-emitting activities, because this is challenging European law.

So now, according to some people, The Netherlands is in lock-down. Building projects have been halted, and Dutch livestock numbers need to be reduced. Of course it is understandable that builders and farmers are upset; they are just trying to protect their livelihood.

The reality of maternity leave.

It has been very quiet here again, because I’ve been on maternity leave for the past six months. And I have struggled to get any work done, let alone write a blog post.

Which is why is wasn’t particularly amused when I read this article in The Guardian, which compares maternity leave with a sabbatical, and gives the impression that you can catch up with the literature and do some deep thinking, while your perfect baby either sleeps or quietly plays on the floor.

So, let me tell you something about how I experienced my maternity leave, and how I feel about maternity leave in general.

How I got my fellowship – and how you might get yours

In my previous post I wrote that I recently got awarded a very competitive BBSRC David Phillips fellowship! And I promised I would dedicate a post to this. Applying for this fellowship has been a lengthy, exiting, and exhausting process, which has taught me a lot about how to write a grant proposal and how to prepare for such an important interview. Although I have applied for grants previously, none of them was anywhere near as much work, and as stressful, as this one.

So, here I will outline the points that I think are crucial for being successful in getting a very competitive fellowship like a BBSRC David Phillips fellowship. I think these points, together, can greatly improve your chances of being successful. But who am I that I think I have advice on this? Well, since 2008 I have applied for seven personal research grants (a Royal Society Newton International Fellowship, a Dutch Rubicon fellowship, a L’Oreal For Women in Science fellowship, a British Ecological Society Early Career grant, a Royal Society International Exchange Grant, a Royal Society University Research Fellowship, and a BBSRC David Phillips Fellowship), of which three were successful. If you consider that the average success rate of this type of grant is around 10%, then that’s pretty good. Moreover, I think I have learned a lot from applying for these grants and getting feedback on them, and I believe that as a result, I got better at it. Also, I regularly review grants for a range of funders, and I think this has improved my own grant writing.

Here are my tips.

A very short history of creativity in science

Is science creative? I know that the process of scientific discoveries can be, or ought to be – is inherently? – creative. You can find some interesting opinions here, but it boils down to having to be resourceful and imaginative to design experiments for answering difficult, or big questions. I agree. However, I think that increasingly, the process of scientific discovery is constrained and pushed into a straight jacket, with implications for the creativity that is necessary to come to great scientific discoveries. Who still has time to wander through nature, observing and thinking? To have long discussions during coffee breaks, and philosophise about new ideas and approaches?

Yet this is what early scientists did. They studied the patterns they observed in nature, through spending time in nature. Think about Newton being sat under a tree when the apple fell on his head, or about Darwin and his voyage on the Beagle. Think about their books, that read like adventure novels. In the early days of the Royal Society, in the 1600’s, science and philosophy, or metaphysics, were inseparable, and doing science consisted for a large part of talking about it. Later, there were close ties between poets and scientists, and romanticism had a major impact on 19th century science. For example, the romantic poet Samuel Coleridge travelled to Germany and presumably influenced natural scientists such as Alexander Humboldt. Coleridge and his friend Wainwright got their inspiration while going on long and exhausting walks, often for weeks on end, and having opium-fuelled discussions through the night.

The diversity beneath our feet

Yesterday, Georgina Mace gave a seminar in the Faculty of Life Sciences at the University of Manchester. Of course, I was at the front row (well, almost), as I have only just started at Manchester and I was employed to reinforce ecology and environmental sciences in the Faculty. I have seen Georgina Mace speak before, and today she spoke about biodiversity, and specifically, the decline of it.

In her talk, she highlighted trends in the decline of plants, birds, mammals, reptiles, fish, and amphibians, mainly as a result of habitat destruction. She spoke about mechanisms of these organisms to cope with disturbances; some species just cope with changing circumstances, some move away to new habitats, and some (or, rather a lot, as evidenced by the graphs in her presentation) go extinct. At the end of her talk, she spoke about why biodiversity is important for humans. First of all, humans value biodiversity because of its intrinsic value – we simply want to know that there are elephants in Africa, or panda bears in China (although personally, I couldn’t care less about panda bears).  Second, we want to conserve species because we want to preserve the genetic library of life, and all the information about its evolution that is locked up in genes. And finally, we want to conserve biodiversity because it provides ecosystem services that are directly beneficial for humans, although the science underpinning this relationship is still thin on the ground.

Blog and Twitter etiquette in academia?

Three weeks ago, I was a social media virgin. This is only my third blog post, and so far I have tweeted 37 times (that includes my tweet about this post!). I deliberately started both my blog and my Twitter account from a professional point of view – I don’t have the illusion that strangers want to read about my social life (I might write about this on Facebook), or what I have for breakfast (something that I would never write about on Facebook). But, I do think I might have something sensible to say about science, and I do think that maybe others, who are in a similar career stage, or maybe a bit more junior, might find it interesting to read about my career. But, I have already written about why I decided to write a blog here.

There seems to be a fair amount written about general etiquette in blogging and tweeting. For Twitter, here it says that you shouldn’t scream or stalk, which seems quite obvious to me. Then, for blogging, obviously, you need to comply with copyright law and cite your sources (but I am assuming that everyone on academia does this anyway), be polite, and don’t make spelling mistakes. Here, you can find some content on how to promote your science blog, with the general message that this is a good thing to do. I also found a rather old Guardian article about whether journalists’ professional guidelines apply to their personal activities online.

A little bit of background on my latest paper

In my latest paper, Extensive management promotes plant and microbial nitrogen retention in temperate grassland, published in PLoS ONE last month, we show that traditionally managed, species rich haymeadows lose less nitrogen with drainage water from their soils than more intensively managed grasslands. This is important, because nitrogen that leaches from the soil can pollute ground and surface water, reduce plant species diversity, and cause problems for human health if concentrations in drinking water are getting too high.

In this paper, we used both extensive field observations and a mechanistic glasshouse experiment to show that traditional haymeadows have lower nitrogen leaching because of more uptake of available nitrogen in plant roots and in microbes. Specifically, we found that a greater biomass of soil fungi increased microbial nitrogen uptake, and that this in turn increased the retention of nitrogen retention in soil.

These results confirm an ecological theory, namely that ecosystems with a more fungal-dominated microbial community are more efficient in their nitrogen cycling, and have thus lower nitrogen losses. This is not a novel theory at all – in fact, it is often assumed to be true, but it has never before been experimentally tested. To illustrate this, in this Science paper, it is said that ‘Because fungal-based soil food webs promote less leaky nutrient cycles that are more retentive of nutrients than do bacterial-based food webs…’ and subsequently, a paper by Coleman et al. from 1983  is cited. However, on further inspection, this appears to be a review paper, which by no means proves that this theory is correct. Moreover, it is not possible to adequately test this theory, since it is not possible to take the microbial community out of its environment, and thus it is impossible to test whether it is the composition of the microbial community that is responsible for lower nitrogen leaching, or its environment, for example the amount of organic matter in the soil.