Just start writing
Writing is not the chore at the end of the project. It is the project.
If you ask a working scientist in the life sciences what they actually do for a living, writing is rarely the first thing they mention, and often not even in the top five. And it’s clear why: in most labs, the unofficial hierarchy puts the experiment and the analysis well above the manuscript that eventually comes out of all of it. Writing is relegated to the part you do once the “real” work is done, the bureaucratic chore at the end of the project. I held something like this view myself for years. To be clear, this was an implicit view; I never consciously decided that writing was less important. But that was the implicit hierarchy I operated under nonetheless.
And the broader trend is moving in the same direction. Indeed, in a 2017 eLife study analyzing more than 700,000 abstracts spanning 130 years, Plavén-Sigray and colleagues showed that the readability of scientific writing has been declining steadily for decades. Last week, in an editorial that prompted me to write this post, Nature announced that the future of science communication is no longer written articles, and that it is now joining TikTok.
I think this consensus is exactly backwards. Writing is not just one part of the job. On the contrary: it is the part of the job that matters most. It took me longer than I would like to admit to reach this realization, but when you think about it, a finding that never gets written up has, in any practical sense, not entered the field; it cannot be evaluated, built upon, or used by anyone else. The value of an experiment is only ever realized when its results and interpretation are committed to writing, where they can be read critically by others and folded into the broader scientific record. In other words, unwritten science is not just incomplete; it simply does not exist for the purposes of the field. When you look at it this way, the job of a scientist - having ideas, testing them, and persuading others they are right - turns out to be, fundamentally, an act of writing.
The clearest articulation of this view I have come across is a recent Career Feature in Nature Biotechnology by Dennis Hazelett, titled “An open letter to graduate students and other procrastinators: it’s time to write”. The article is excellent and should be required reading; it is only 4 pages and well worth your time. Hazelett puts the case more clearly than I ever could:
The most important trait for you to have lasting impact on humanity, and indeed to sustain your career, is your ability to have ideas, to gather evidence in support of them, and to publish them. Your job is to have ideas and spread them so that they impact other people’s work. Writing is your job. Nothing else. Therefore, everything else that you do is subservient to the activity of writing. Let this revolution take place in your mind.
The reframe is uncomfortable for a reason that I think is structural rather than personal. Most of us were trained to treat writing as the activity that happens once the science is done; the documentation step at the end of the project, rather than as the activity through which the science actually accumulates and becomes useful. Work that is not written, in any practical sense, has not entered the field, because the field cannot use a result that cannot be read. In other words, if it is not written, it has no value. Hazelett’s sharper version of this point is that everything else, including the experiments and the analyses we are quietly proud of, is properly in service of the writing rather than the other way around.
The deeper claim, and I think the more important one, is that writing is itself how thinking gets done. Ideas only reveal whether they actually hold up once you have forced them into complete sentences. Anyone who has tried to write down a half-formed argument knows the particular feeling of watching it dissolve under the light of its own prose. This happened to me so many times: “this grant proposal writes itself” I think, only to start writing it and realize that some of the ideas that were so clear in my head do not make sense when I try to put them to paper. Hazelett puts it better than I can:
The only kind of thinking that matters in science is structured thinking. The only way to give structure and substance to your thoughts is to write them down. Writing. Is. Thinking.
This has direct implications for how we think about AI writing tools. Do not outsource your writing to AI. If writing is thinking, then asking an AI to produce your first draft, structure your argument, or put your ideas into sentences for the first time is asking it to do your thinking for you. The value of writing a specific aims page, a methods section, or an interpretation of your results is not necessarily the document it produces; it is the process of forcing your ideas into coherent prose and discovering, often uncomfortably, which of them actually hold up. 1
This is also why writing should not be something you do at the end of the project, but something that runs in parallel with the science itself. Write the study design before you run the experiment. Write up your results as you generate them. Write your interpretation as it develops. This may seem like busywork, but it is how you make sense of what you are doing while you are still doing it, and how you catch the ideas that do not hold up before you have spent another six months chasing them.
The same principle extends well beyond the manuscript. Write down an idea when you have it, even a half-formed one, before it dissolves back into the noise. Write a specific aims page for the project you have been thinking about but have not committed to yet. Write the plan for your analysis before you run it. Write up your results and their interpretation as you generate them, not six months later when the context has faded. Write a response to a paper you disagreed with. Start a blog and share your thoughts with a general audience. Just start writing.
Hazelett goes further than I would and bans LLM use for writing in his lab entirely, but the underlying logic is the same. I do think there is a narrower role for these tools that is reasonable and even helpful, like polishing a draft, fixing syntax, tightening a paragraph you have already written, finding errors and inconsistencies, etc; but that is editing, not writing.