a good scienist needs to be a good writer

Foto ga nyambung, biarlah. I love this picture and miss that place and memory

All these PhD workshops give you mixed feelings. One day, you enter a workshop talking about plagiarsm and you feel that writing is a big challenging stuff, when you have to process information and paraphrase it consicely, and you feel like..wow, it takes a lot of energy just to start writing.

But then you attend this writing workshop and the presenter gave you stuff like, write as you go, write anything you want, just write, practice makes perfect, everyone can write, a scientist must write, and then you end up with this urge to write.

It’s a good workshop though, so I think I need to summarize it here. 
the first thing to do I believe is start reading, and read good stuff. the presenter gave several examples of good writers with good books. Oh God, I missed a lot of things. what did I do all this time? facebooking!! 

Ok!
Nah, the second thing is start writing. anything. so, read a lot! write a lot! I should make this blogging a regular thing. once in two days? ok, keep that as a target!

There are several tips following.
– block a regular time each day to write, at least an hour, 2 would be great. during this time, just write, don’t worry about structure, spelling and other things. you can come back to it later, and you need to come back later if you want to produce something useful, haha!
– in terms of scientific writing, never try to start with a blank page! make some outlines, produce some figures from you experiment. anything to start from. 
– again, read good stuff from good scientists who are also good writers. be inspired, copy how they do them if you need.
– there’s no such thing as perfect writing. even the nicest piece can always be revised and made better. so, don’t get afraid. produce something. it might be some rubbish in the beginning, but practice makes better.
– try to imagine someone in your mind as you write, and write to that particular person. someone like your friend, and you colleague, not your professor for sure, it would be too much pressure! haha


I can’t remember anything else now, so I guess I would come back later if I do remember other things.
the more important thing now is start writing!!!

so, he also mentioned that a good scientist need to be a good writer. if you don’t write, you perish, it’s something he said too I remember. a scientist is often measured not by how good she/he is at the lab, doing experiment, but more on how good he/she writes and communicates the science. You can not get publication if you don’t write, and you have to write to graduate. I never realized how important writing is!

so….
ganbatte!!