Mary Grace Soccio. My writing could not please this kindhearted woman, nomatter how hard I tried.
Although Gifted and Talented seventh-grade math posed no problem forme, the same was not true for Mrs. Soccio’s English class. I was frustratedthat my first assignment only netted me a C. I worked harder, making revi-sion after revision, a concept I had never really put much faith in before. Atlast, I produced an essay that seemed the apex of what I was capable of writ-ing. Although the topic of that essay is now lost to my memory, the grade Ireceived was not: a B−.
“The best I could do was a B−?” The realization sank in that maybe I wasnot such a good writer.
In those days, my youthful hubris did not understand about capacity build-ing. In other words, being challenged would result in my intellectual growth—an academic restatement of Nietzsche’s “What does not destroy me, makes mestronger.” Consequently, I asked to be withdrawn from Gifted and TalentedEnglish in the eighth grade.
Another capacity-building experience happened when I was a post-doctoral research fellow. In writing the journal article that resulted from myPh.D. thesis, one of my coadvisors, Dan Keyser, and I discussed revisions byphone while he lived in upstate New York and I in Oklahoma. My schoolingwas severe: fifteen one-hour-long phone calls where we would go through thedraft together—one section at a time, sentence by sentence. Not all of Dan’slessons I embraced immediately, however. Sometimes we were frustrated byeach others’ stubbornness: me by his insistence to do things his way and he bymy resistance to learning. Finally, something snapped inside and clarity came:I understood what he was trying to tell me about transition, coherence, andprecision, and it made complete sense. Subsequent revisions went much moresmoothly, and the manuscript made it easily through the review process and was published. Wherever that revelation came from, Eloquent Science wouldnot have happened without that moment.
Throughout my career, mentoring by Dan, my other advisors, and mycolleagues was essential to my development as a scientist and a writer. Un-fortunately, not everyone has the benefit of such mentoring. The good newsis that being a better writer, whether a student or a scientist with years ofexperience, does not require a revelation, merely an open mind. As I hope toconvince you in this book, the essential skills can be taught. Moreover, it’s notjust the young dogs who can be taught new tricks. Everyone, no matter howexperienced, can learn new skills to improve their writing.
Eloquent Science is an outgrowth of a scientific communication work-shop I developed for the National Science Foundation–funded Research Ex-periences for Undergraduates program that the Oklahoma Weather Center(and its members the National Severe Storms Laboratory, the University ofOklahoma, the Cooperative Institute for Mesoscale Meteorological Studies,and Center for the Analysis and Prediction of Storms) hosted from 1998 to2005, and has continued from 2007 to this writing. After seeing that we werenot educating our students about how to write a scientific paper and makea scientific presentation, I created and led this workshop during 2000–2005.The workshop began as a collection of thoughts on a Web site, turned intoan afternoon lecture, and became an eight-hour interactive workshop wherestudents learned to critique their own and their peers’ writing. I argued thatthese undergraduates would be my future colleagues, and I would likely bereviewing their papers and attending their seminars. Besides my desire to seethem create excellent scientific work and present it effectively, I realized thatif I could influence them not to write a bad paper or make a bad presentationin the future, I could be saving myself some subsequent heartaches.
As I developed the workshop from year to year, the organic approach tookits toll. My slides, with new insertions each year, were characterized at best asverbose lecture notes rather than a clear and effective presentation. Also in-adequate was the poorly organized collection of articles and handouts servingas a reference guide. Neither were even adequate examples of the instructionI was trying to give. The idea for turning the lectures into a book struck insummer 2005 while at a conference, frustrated by the pathetic presentationsI was enduring. A book would solve both my problems, I thought. It wouldcreate a more effective vehicle to deliver the information on paper and free meto focus on improving the style of the presentations. An added benefit, I wish-fully dreamt, might be to distribute this book to other atmospheric scientiststo ease the kind of pain I experienced at that conference
Writing a book about communicating effectively to a scientific audienceis like speaking to an audience at a classical music concert about how to playa violin as a virtuoso would. Although some in the audience will learn quite a bit and benefit immediately, more experienced violinists need only specificadvice to improve. Moreover, future performances by the speaker will be in-tensively scrutinized. As with that speaker, I fear that my words will comeback to haunt me in the future. (I can already hear readers raising questionsabout my previous publications!) In my defense, few writers alive today be-lieve that their previous work is impervious to revisions. And we should notexpect perfection, either. In fact, many examples in Eloquent Science derivefrom my own writings and presentations: not only the best examples, but theimperfect, as well. For my future writing efforts, I can only plead forgivenessfor a limited brain capacity to store and recall the abundant information con-tained within this book.
窥视卡
雷达卡
发表于 2018-12-28 21:20:29
提升卡
置顶卡
沉默卡
喧嚣卡
变色卡
抢沙发
千斤顶
显身卡