Is being a poor writer a serious impediment as a researcher? [duplicate]

Question

Is being a poor writer a serious impediment as a researcher? I mean if you're particularly bad at writing reports and always get bad feedback as a student for your reports, does that mean my research career would never take off?

The question asks whether researchers working in teams are all required to contribute to composing the reports or can you get away with it if you compensate with other skills?

Answer 1

Yes, you need to be able to write to be successful in academia, as in many things.

But it is a skill that can be learned. You can take courses and you can practice. And, as with most learning, practice with feedback is the path. It isn't a short path, necessarily, but it is one that you can follow.

Actually, there are courses in both creative writing and technical writing.

You need to write with both precision and clarity and sometimes those are in opposition. But practice (with feedback) helps.

Answer 2

If one truly cannot write coherently, yes, that is a serious impediment.

Yes, when/if you get negative feedback on your reports, it means that you need to improve the quality of your writing in those reports.

That's it.

But/and one's writing ability is not an immovable object. One can improve, with effort. Effort.

Answer 3

No, poor writing as a student is not necessarily an impediment to becoming a good researcher. You will just need to work hard to improve and find a good advisor or fellow researcher to critique your writing.

I think that good writing is linked with good thinking. I have spent a lot of time reading work by non-native English speakers. Sometimes, even if the grammar and word usage is wrong, I can easily tell what the writer is trying to say because their writing is logical and well-organized. I have a colleague whose mother tongue doesn't have articles. He will probably miss some necessary "a"s and put "the"s where they are not needed for the rest of his life, but this is quite easy for any native speaker to clean up since his arguments are always very clear. Writing style is less important than logic and organization and, for students early in their career, this is often the biggest problem. This sometimes has nothing to do with writing style and everything to do with the fact that they don't really have a broad understanding of the research field they are writing about: they include many small irrelevant details and do not make the necessary big picture arguments. Also, they often put no thought into organization and just spill out the ideas in a random order with no links between them.

Of the several graduate students and postdocs I've mentored (~15), almost all started out as what I would call poor writers. They all improved through writing their own papers and going through many drafts with me. I suggest that you find an advisor who you consider to be a reasonably good writer and is willing to go through your papers with you, making specific comments on how you can improve. If your advisor won't help you, see if you can find another researcher willing to help. Talk to other students in the group and find out if they are good at mentoring their students through writing.

Writing is absolutely essential for an academic research career, and after becoming relatively senior you will spend most of your time writing.

If you are a non-native English speaker, you may think you are a poor writer because people correct mistakes in your grammar or word usage. I wouldn't worry too much about this because these things can be superficial. Focus on a logical argument and good organization, and you can probably find a coworker (or pay someone) to fix your English.

Answer 4

It depends what kind of a research team you're on. It will be hard to succeed in an academic (tenure-track) research professorship if you write poorly, because you would always have to find collaborators to help you with grant proposals and research papers; and, there is an expectation that you will be an independent researcher, which will be harder to establish if you always have to co-author grants and papers (for example, the main source of funding for many Canadian STEM researchers is the Discovery Grant program, which is a solo rather than a group submission).

There may be some niches in industry or governmental labs/research groups where you could successfully delegate the writing to someone else. You could also aim for a permanent technical position in a large academic lab, but these positions are (1) rare; (2) often based on "soft money" (i.e. you or your supervisor would have to keep writing successful grants for you to keep your job); (3) less well paid/less prestigious than typical solo-research-professor positions.

Answer 5

It is a serious impediment, but I personally know people who, despite being successful researchers, have immense problems with writing a paragraph of clear text in a grammatically correct english. There are not that many of them though.

Regarding how to deal with that, apart from the obvious solution proposed (improve with effort), another possibility is to find and join a team where you'll be responsible for something you're good at, another person would be responsible for writing, and you'll publish together. This is very situational and does not happen too often, but it exists.

Answer 6

It's hard to properly answer this without having samples of your writing or of the edits made by your critics.

One of the saddest - and stupidest - things in academic work is academese. Months and even years of work and thought on a topic should result in conclusions that are clearly communicable both orally and in writing. Yet so few papers can be easily read. It may well be that you are the type who can speak clearly about something but have been repeatedly discouraged in writing about it with the same simple style: it's not professionally sophisticated, not the done way, etc. If this is the problem, then you may well be better off than those of us who adopted the orthodox way of (mis)communicating things in reports, reviews and papers - you can teach yourself how to do it right without having to unlearn the habit of writing pompous nonsense.

You need to do two things, I think.

1. As Buffy said, attend a professional writing course for people in your general field.

2. Ignore criticism of your writing that seems to be based on lack of orthodoxy to existing academic writing styles.

For real feedback look at what your own peers are writing and how it's expressed. Select the best ones in your own assessment and try to get their genuine views on your writing. The older generation tend to become more traditional and orthodox. And try to get opinion from peers who are not native users of the language. It's a good sign if they can get it on first reading.

One sure way to improve your writing in English is to translate your own papers (or at least the abstracts) into some other language. The simpler your phrasing for an idea is, the easier it is to translate it. There follows the great conclusion - why didn't I write it as simply as this in English from the start ?

Answer 7

In order to be successful in academia, one has to be performant in teaching, research, applications for grants and administrative tasks. If being a poor writer is not a so huge problem if you have to fill a form, this can be a problem:

• in teaching, as it will be harder for the students to understand your notes;
• in research. One can have the best idea in the world, but it might not be appreciated or even publish if one is not able to present it in an understandable way.
• In application for grant (but more generally in any application), as it is difficult to be convincing by writing poorly.

This being said, the good new is that there is always the possibility to improve. Sometimes it is difficult to have criticism on what we wrote ourselves, like the phenomenon where you mentally correct some typos. It can be a good way to read what you wrote as if it was written by your worst enemy and you would like to criticize it as much as possible.

Also, take profit of the feedback you got on your writing.

To answer the last question, contribution of the authors is usually very dependent on the field you work. An understatement is that everybody would prefer to work with a good writer than a bad one.

To conclude, one can have in mind the 5C-rule for writing:

• correctness
• concision
• completeness of the information
• clarity
• coherence

and each text/report you write should satisfy this.

Answer 8

This is from a non-native-speaker, STEM perspective.

• It is common for undergraduate/graduate students to be bad at writing at the beginning.
• In countries like Russia and China, an undergraduate or a graduate student often obtains their first good results while they still lack English skill to write them up. Old-generation Russian professors used to write up the results of their students (without being listed as co-authors).
• Most of the accomplished researchers have decent writing skills. It might be, of course, selection, but I suspect they just learn. If you are able to make progress in modern science, then you are smart and hence you can learn to write (of course, barring certain medical conditions).
• In STEM fields, minimal sufficient level is rather low. It's OK to use simple language and a toolbox of standard expressions, follow a standard template (e. g. "Definition - Example - Lemma - Proof - Theorem - Proof"). The outcome may be dry and not "beautifully written", but if the result is interesting enough, this will not prevent people from reading.
• While it is true that there are courses that teach writing (and it's good to take them!), I suspect that, just like generally with languages, most learning happens through osmosis, exposure and practice. As you read many research papers, you will start picking up from them. Also, you will inevitably practice writing up you own results.
• No, not all team members have to participate in writing. It suffices that one member of a team of co-authors writes the text. If someone takes up this task and the result is not satisfactory, the co-authors who are more qualified will edit.
• Don't shy away from writing tasks in a team if your writing skills are poor, use this opportunity to practice and learn.

Answer 9

The following assumes that "poor writer" means that you have profound problems in explaining yourself in written manner. If this is the case it is a serious impediment.

Presenting results is almost as important as obtaining them. Especially when trying to get funding or get published in high impact factor journals. I've seen drafts that were almost incomprehensible and required massive editing to carve out the obfuscated but substantial results. Writing up results is a large aspect of academia and I don't think that someone who lacks the ability to present their results in an intelligible manner will prevail on their own. Most of the time, you can find help in some form, so not all is lost, but it is certainly a hurdle that one needs to take.