I'll say it this way, a lot of times people come in and they'll apologize. They'll say, oh, I'm sorry, this is really messy. Or oh, I'm really it's really early in this process. You know, I they feel like it's not good enough to present it to me. Right. And I'm the person that you bring, messy drafts to. And I more and more, I find myself saying, you know, the messy, messier, the better, right? I'd rather you bring me something messy. I love the bad drafts. Hello everybody. Welcome to MIT Learn. Today in the studio we have Adrienne Tierney, a lecturer in the Writing and Communication Center here at MIT. And together we are going to find out Why THIS Matters.

But before we get to this, thanks for being here, Adrienne. Thanks for having me. How are you doing today? Great. That's good. Quick and to the point. Concise. A virtue. Yeah. So I like to start with a little bit of a bigger question to get the get our juices flowing. So in the world of generative AI LLMs, and even just the prominent video and audio communication that a lot of people go through, how is writing staying relevant? Well, I don't want to overstate, but I do feel like we're going to find out that writing is more important than ever because of those things. I think that it's a really important way for people to find their voice, to find, to help them figure out what their contribution is.

And to I mean, I'm a, I'm an educator, at my base. And I think it's just a really important learning tool. And I think it's going to help us refine how we can use it effectively to support learning. What role does it play and kind of the, the work that we want to do. So I don't think we're there yet. But my hope in the long term is that we start to realize that the writing serves a really important purpose that can't just be replaced by generative AI. What we when you say finding people's voice, what parts of the writing process do you think really ground that for people? I think that a lot of I'll back up a little bit.

I think a lot of people think that writing is just kind of carrying out what you already know. And I don't think that's true. I think writing helps you figure out what you know, what you think. And so in terms of kind of finding your voice, finding, you know, grappling with the thoughts and the ideas and how you want to say them in what order you want to say them, helps you refine what you want to say. And it's through that where all the sudden you're like, oh yeah, that's what I meant. And you have this amorphous idea in your mind of what you might want to say, or even a really, ambiguous idea. That's really hard to communicate in, in language to other people.

And through writing, you figure out what that is, and by the end, you end up with something that you may not have even been able to imagine when you started. And I think it's through that where people feel like they find, you know, whether you call it your voice or, you know, what's your novel contribution or you know, something that distinguishes what you think from what other people think. With, writing, there's different flavors of it. And I think a lot of people we, you know, we write emails or so on, there's, there's this other er texting each other, there's this other types of communication. Do you feel that there are almost agnostic or applicable patterns that people are habits that people should be focusing on when it comes to writing, in these different forms?

Or is there, is there more just one for each type of type of communication? I think you're kind of going in the right direction of like writing is not one thing, right? That, you know, if I have if I have this transactional task that I need to accomplish to let people know about, you know, what we're going to be doing at the next meeting or follow up on some logistical thing. You know, a lot of that happens through email. A lot of it happens through text. And so it's a simplified version of communication. It serves a really important purpose, but I don't really know if it's doing what I said before of really engaging with thought, versus something like, if you are writing a grant or you are writing, a paper for a class for publication, something a little bit more connected to things that you are, you know, a specialist in or you're developing expertise in that feels like it's a little bit closer to the, the, the, the, the reasoning, the thinking, the kind of cognitive engagement.

So definitely, I think there are different forms of writing. I think there are different levels of engagement with those writing, those types of writing. And, and part of part of what we're realizing is that there are just so many different kinds of communication, techniques that we use writing for. And we kind of have to figure out, you know, what, what purpose do they serve and how do we engage with them? So you mentioned, this technical, technical writing a reports and, so that's scientific writing mostly, right? And how is that so much different than, maybe the creative writing that people do in English class or so on or any of their language classes and, and what would be the driving purpose of scientific writing?

Well, I think there are a couple of ways you can answer that question. First of all, it's a communication tool, right? That science isn't really about what any one person does. It's about what people do collectively. Is a field right that that science moves forward because of this collective endeavor? You know, we we test hypotheses, we we make some claims, we come up with some new experiments, we refine them. There's kind of this over overriding process of, of scientific inquiry that's happening and that's mediated through these publications. Right. That the only way that I can let you know, you know, the results of my, my study and, and what I think about them and how to interpret them is through publications.

It's the currency of how people, share their ideas with other people. And so there's the writing isn't just kind of, you know, me coming up with these ideas and either I don't want to simplify too much what creative writing is, but but it's not just happening in the context of, of my mind and, and kind of even my perceptions about the world. It engages with the scientific method, the processes, the method, the the techniques, that we use in the laboratory or, you know, whatever the discipline appropriate techniques are that we use. So it's really engaging with that, that process. And so I think it's fundamentally different in and how it, it interacts with the, The inquiry, you know, whether it's in I'm trying to summarize across like all scientific domains.

Right. And they're so very different with whether they're, you know, modeling or experimental. And yet there is some kind of core, methodological base for, for all of them. And writing is really to, to support that process along the way. It's not it's kind of even though I wouldn't say that writing is kind of a byproduct of it, it's kind of happening alongside it in ways that I think are different than in other disciplines with. So you bring up an interesting point about scientific writing, where a lot of these articles that get sent out there and peer reviewed, it's it's part of a calm conversation. It's it's almost a whereas if I, you know, write a paper or something that's, you know, how my cat likes to jump around or something, it's, that's a point in time.

That's me talking about something. Unless I'm maybe doing a blog, I'm not having a conversation with people. And do you think that the aspect of the conversation affects how people try to design what they're setting out there and how they write? I hope so. I think that the best version of a paper is one that assumes that we're engaging in a conversation. So if you think about your standard publication where you have an introduction, methods, results, discussion, that first section is about joining an existing conversation. And if you write the paper with that in mind, then you're able to establish, okay, well, what's the context that I'm building on?

What's the question that emerges from what's already been done? And how am I going to insert myself into to that, that, train of thought? And to do that, well, you have to know what has come before you. You know what? Research already has been done. What are the major points of contention in your field? So to know the conversation already, helps you establish what you are doing in the context of your own research. And so if you write that paper with that already in mind, you're effectively kind of creating a mini conversation within the context of your paper. And I think that's true on the other end too, in your discussion section, as you interpret your results and put them into context with existing results or existing findings, you're again kind of bringing the conversation back full circle to everything else that's going on in your in your discipline and your field outside, say.

With, I guess with scientific writing is it is this style of, I guess, really methodical, communicative writing, just for scientists. And what who else is it for? Is there? Because there's, I think, myself included. I think a lot of maybe a lot of engineers or sciency people, may pick the engineer or science path because they foresee less writing. Yeah. Yeah, I think that's true. I think that's true. And then I think people get really surprised on the other end, where you realize that most of your career is going to be dedicated to writing, grants papers, you know, conference papers. You know, there's a lot of ways in which science ends up being a lot about writing.

So I think, yes, it's about communication, but I also think it goes back to what I was saying before that it's also a means for people to figure out what they think. It's a way to reason through some of the complications that arise. You know, if you end up with findings that are surprising to you or that you don't quite know what to do with them, writing is a way of engaging with your thinking to kind of figure things out. And so I'm not sure if that answers your question, but but it is it is about communication. But it's also it also serves, purposeful role to, of intellectual development of the scientists themselves of like, how do I grapple with this?

How do I articulate this? And, and so it's a problem solving tool just as much as it is a communication tool. Yeah. Well said. And you, at the WCC or the writing communication Center, you help people develop their problem solving skills for that, that writing. Can you can you tell me a little bit about your role and how really how you ended up in this field and doing what you're doing right now? Sure. So I'll start with the description of the role. So we work with anybody at mid. I think for the most part, we work a lot with graduate students and postdocs who are kind of in that transition between kind of, you know, being the recipient of an education versus being kind of an independent researcher who's moving out on their own and writing becomes, as I mentioned before, kind of the fuel for that, that process.

And so we work with a lot of, people on dissertations, on fellowship, applications on job applications. And a lot of it is, is less about I mean, it could be about sentence level things if, if, you know, we're trying to make the language precise. But a lot of it's about will, you know, what are you trying to say? You know, what do you mean? And let's look at what you've said and figure out. Does that accurately reflect what you mean? So there's it's a lot about conversation between me and, the person in front of me to help them figure out how to use writing in that, that kind of problem solving way. And so it's, it's almost off most almost always conversation based, because it's not like I can go in there and just fix grammatical errors.

Right? Sure. Maybe at some point that might be, an important thing to do for polishing. But for the most, for most of the time, it's really about helping people figure out what they want to say. Is there a better order in which they want to say it? Because that's more logical, you know, to help them make sense of their own thoughts so that when they put it on paper and they then give it to somebody else who who's then the recipient of their writing, the person on the receiving end has a clearer idea about what that person was trying to say. And that your second question about how did I get here? That's a that's a long that's a long journey.

Because I was I'm not a writer by training, a scientist by training. And yet when I was done with grad school, I had been doing a lot of writing focused things as a grad student, being a teaching fellow, giving people feedback on their writing, and realizing that people were really struggling with using writing as as a pedagogical tool, as an assessment tool. And so I just kind of got into that, the trajectory I ended up being a writing fellow, and then I ended up taking a job, in a writing program. And, and that just kind of set me on that path about how do people use writing in the sciences? And then fast forward, you know, 15 years and I'm sitting in front of you talking about it meant to be. Yeah.

Yeah, actually, that's probably true. Yeah. With, what were you doing in science beforehand? So as an undergrad, I was a neuroscience major. Well, and I, at that point, I envisioned having a career in neuroscience. So my first job out of grad school. Out of college, rather, I was working at NIH, doing neurophysiology. And that was actually a really helpful job because I realized that I didn't want to work with rats. Neurophysiology with animal models was uncomfortable for me. I actually prefer working with, people. So then I took a job teaching, just as, you know, one of those kind of, you know, when you're out of college and you're trying to figure out what direction you want to go in, sometimes you pick, you know, different, unexpected directions, let's say.

So I was teaching biology and chemistry for a little while and then went back to grad school and actually had combined those two things. So I was doing, I was in the, mind brain Education human development program at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and that was basically looking at how do we how do we combine what we know about neuroscience and, and learning. And so thinking about this was actually, at the time, a little bit crazy when people were starting to think about, well, in what way is the brain relevant to learning? And I think if you know, by this point, I think it's feels like an important question to ask and maybe somewhat of an obvious question to ask.

But in the beginning that was not, an obvious connection to me. So it was it was an exciting time to be think about the connection between those two things. What were some of the striking findings from your experience with that? A lot of them, in the early days had to do with things like dyslexia, right? That we started to understand, like, but from looking at different activation patterns in the brain, we started to realize that it's not just about, you know, phonetics, it's or phonemes. It's about, you know, there's an integration of multiple modalities. And looking at it gave us a little bit more insight into what was going on.

I think that was true also for thinking about different patterns of ADHD. There were at the beginning they were very much focused on kind of, you know, disorders or, you know, dysfunction in certain kinds. I don't think we talk about it in quite the same way now. But that was some of the early parts of thinking of realizing, oh, actually, if we if we think about the brain, we can understand learning and development in, in ways that we might not have expected. Yeah. Seems an important connection. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Very much. And, we might have to have you back on because, I mean, I have dyslexia and, one of our other cohorts also.

And it'd be really I'd love to hear more, but I don't do biology on this one, so. Got it, got it. Well, my that was that was some of the early findings. My research was more on autism and the development of autism. Yeah. And kind of how to how to think about, trajectories of, of development. So I don't know how much I can, fill in for some of those, but there are people in our community that that do incredible work on that. And they'd be really neat with, thinking about the brain and writing this. Is there per writing style? Is there something you can learn about a person and how they're thinking when they're when they're like, say, when you're they're giving you a draft or something?

Do you get an idea of, how they want to present that information? Definitely. I think in some ways that's one of the most interesting things about my job and working with people is that people have very different ways of thinking. They have very different ways of organizing their thoughts. They have very different ways of, of, of interacting with writing and the strategies around it. So I think you get a lot of information about the person sitting in front of you in terms of them, not just as, you know, a writer, but as a person who engages in the world and has to manage lots of different demands, and put things together and kind of, you know, eliminate distractions to, to get something done.

I think there's a lot that you learn about a person as their they're kind of working through that process and figuring out, well, what works for you. You know what works, because what works for you may not work for somebody else. For any number of reasons. And so trying to figure out and listening really carefully about what people say, what kinds of things they notice, what impressions they have about their own writing process. It's often as much about that as it is what words they want to put on a, on a page. So since you do see a lot of draft writing, are there what are some of the common pitfalls maybe or, or things that you see everybody getting right out of the gate?

I think the biggest pitfall that I see, or I'll say it this way, a lot of times people come in and they'll apologize. They'll say, oh, I'm sorry, this is really messy. Or oh, I'm really it's really early in this process. You know, I they feel like it's not good enough to present it to me. Right. And I'm the person that you bring, messy drafts to. And I more and more, I find myself saying, you know, the messy, messier, the barrier better, right? I'd rather you bring me something messy. I love the bad drafts, and I say that, and people think I'm just, you know, I'm, you know, humoring them or trying to make them feel better about it.

But I genuinely mean that I need to see the bad draft because it's from the bad draft that we actually figure out what they want to say. So, you know, linking back to what we were talking about before in terms of finding, a person's voice, it's through the mess that all the sudden we come across this sentence or a passage and all of a sudden you're like, well, that's interesting. Tell me a little bit more about what you meant when you wrote that. And then that opens up, a whole conversation about, you know, things that maybe they hadn't even they hadn't even recognized that that was an interesting thought.

Right. Or that there was more behind it or that it, you know, there was so much of an idea packed into those words that we needed, you know, 20, 25 minutes to figure out what they actually were trying to say with that. So I think that's one of the biggest pitfalls is to think that your writing should be better, too early in the process, that you really have to give yourself time to work through the, the formative drafts, the drafts where you feel like you're nowhere and and to give yourself a little bit of grace in that development process. I think a lot of people focus on the product of writing, and that's really important because at the end, you have to submit your application, you have to submit your publication, and somebody else is going to evaluate it.

And that is very important. But there's so much about the writing process that comes before that product is even possible. And so helping people focus a little bit more on the process and giving them self patience and strategies to how to work through that, I think is, is one of the most important things about my job. What are some of those? You don't have to list them all. I know there are a lot, some of the key habits or strategies that you find work for people. There are so many. And what works for you probably doesn't work for somebody else. So some patterns, a lot of people who struggle with, getting started, you know, the you open the, the word document of the Google doc and that's this blank page, right?

And you sit there in front of it and you're like, I don't even know how to begin. Like, what is what is that first sentence? A lot of times I'll encourage people just to have a conversation with me or with a lab mate, a friend and, and do a little bit of oral drafting, because people in that situation typically find it easier to talk through their ideas. And so then you can have somebody taking notes, you can record yourself, you can have your, your friend kind of repeat back to you what you said. And all of a sudden you realize you have more to say. And then that debt gets over the activation energy of getting started.

And all of a sudden you've you've got something on the page, right? Anything on the page, and you're at least starting the process. So that helps a lot. Other times people will just, you know, want to start writing, in an unstructured way. Right? One of the challenges is that people tend to put structure first, and that can be really overwhelming, because if you haven't figured out the right structure, then you go in circles, thinking, well, if I have to figure out the structure before I start writing, even if you haven't figured out what you want to say. And so then you're kind of in this, this, vortex of not getting started.

So then maybe you start with, writing in a stream of consciousness or just kind of just, you know, start from the beginning. Tell me what you know. If you tell me what you know, then, you know, again, you've got something on the page. But then other people write, they want the structure, they can't do something like that. And so then maybe we'll do something more, traditional, like an outline. But even then, there's a million kinds of outlines that could help people. So it really depends on what people are struggling with. But most of the time, or one of the most common things is people struggle with getting started.

Yeah, I find for me in a lot of projects, if I have if it's a big outline and it's very specific and I end up, honestly, there are some sections that I'm like, I don't even know what I'm supposed to put in here. And. Right, right. Yeah. It gets distracting towards the end of it. I definitely like the the free flowing if I can, if I'm on a time crunch, maybe I'll try to be more focused on what I'm trying to get out on each paragraph or something. Right in in knowing that about yourself, I feel like is one of the most important things about learning how to navigate the writing process. Because writing is not easy.

I think for most people. And figuring out, well, what's what's hardest about it or what are the topics or challenges that you face in different parts of the process. And so knowing that that is something that doesn't work for you. And here's this thing that actually works better is great because then you know how to navigate that, that process where maybe that, outline helps get you started. But at a certain point, you really just need to get rid of it, that your thinking has kind of, developed that, you know, where you want to go. And like you say, the outline is now holding you back from making that progress because it doesn't work anymore from with what you had and ended up saying, what do you think people struggle with writing?

Because writing we I think we think that writing is just a translation of our thoughts. And I think it's a way of figuring out what we think. And that's really hard, because I think we have limited ability to understand our thoughts. And writing ends up being a cognitive tool to help us see what we're thinking. Right? Thinking is, is, you know, it's non-linear, it's association test. It's sometimes in pictures, you know, the, the, the language of thought is, is varies a lot from person to person and is sometimes not very language oriented. And so to write you have to put things in a particular form. Right. We have word after word, sentence after sentence, paragraph after paragraph.

You have this linear form. There's you know, there's expectations of coherence. There's also expectations of of structure and logic. And so to get to that final product where it is all coherent and in everything has been meaningfully put together and, you know, conveys, a coherent and meaningful story that somebody else can appreciate is really hard. And I think is a transformation about of what we think into a different language or written language. And so I think that's what makes it hard. Do you think the like so you keep bringing up this, this storytelling aspect of writing and, this feels like it applies even beyond just scientific writing or communicative writing.

It is this, what people should focus on the most when they're trying to put together a piece of text at some point? Yes. I think oftentimes, you know, you'll you'll put together a draft and it'll be some of the it's like pieces, right? It'll be summary of what other people have said or it'll be, you know, if you're writing a personal statement or research statement, it will be, you know, nuggets of things you have done. Right. And it's raw materials. Right. And so the most helpful thing at that point is, well, what are you trying to say? How do you put these things together? And that's where the idea of okay, well what's your narrative?

What's what story do you want to tell? And it's not that it's a story in a fictitious way. Right. It's a how do you make sense of this for somebody else on the other end who wants to understand, you know, what your, your, you know, the results of your study are or you know why you're the right candidate for this fellowship or for this program. People make sense of material more effectively if it if they receive it as a story, right, that the meaning has been made for them. And so at the, on the writing side of it, then you have to you have to have narrative, you have to have a story. And so to figure out what that is and that's it's a lot about, well, how do you connect from one piece to the other.

How do you why is it in this sequence and not some other sequence? How do you frame this information in a way that helps people understand kind of how you want to orient them in the world? So there's a lot about the storytelling in the narrative that that brings a lot of meaning, right? You have all the raw materials on the page, but it's the it's the narrative. It's the storytelling that kind of helps you make sense of it and orchestrate what the the value is and the purposes of all the other details and items that you include in the writing. So with I guess with all these characteristics we're talking about that might help someone figure out how to write, write well, or do good writing is if I were to nowadays take these tips and, you know, ask a generative eye or a language model or something to, you know, take this stuff that I know that I wrote in bullets and then I need to make a story about it is.

That process gets us somewhere. But some people decide to stop. There is why should they not? Why should they keep going? Yeah. On their own. Yes. Yeah. Well I mean I think it's a little bit of a value principle. Right. That. That hopefully the meaning you're making is meaning that's constructed in your own mind. Right. That our sense of why these things matter, how we make sense of them is, is something that that advances our own thinking that that I don't want to I don't want I to do it for me. It might help me along and might give me some language that I was really grasping for. And yet, you know, I've got to pick it up and take it somewhere because that's my contribution.

Like, it's my thinking. There's ownership, there's authorship, that there's something really valuable, that happens in the confines of our mind when we, when we do some of the work ourselves. And so figuring out, well, what how can we use AI to actually help me in that process? How do we how do we use it to move us forward, as opposed to interrupting the process and doing it for us, which then kind of holds us back in some kind of, you know, if you think about, writing as a way of, a tool for development and progress within our own minds. So, so I think doing it yourself kind of keeps you active, gives you agency, in that process.

And I think, I think that's in one of the essential reasons why we write. Yeah. We'll said, I do notice if I, you know, use an alarm or something that generates something. It's going to be very, it kind of has a specific flavor. So some, you know, it's trained on the internet. Yep. This is, I guess, the most optimum internet flavor of writing, right? Which is not how I write. Right. So if I want it to feel like something that I'm, I'm invested in and someone sees how I'm thinking, and you definitely need to add a little bit more of yourself into it afterwards. Yes. And more and more. And this goes back to my point about bad drafts.

Yeah, I like I like hearing, you know, if I'm reading what you've written or and often in consultations, we'll read things out loud to kind of get some, some clarity on what people are saying. And I love the errors that people make. I love the little quirks in people's writing because it's your own right. It's not optimal, it's not perfect, and sometimes it may not even be accurate. And we can kind of, you know, fix grammatical errors, but I but I love the little quirks in people's writing because it is their voice. Right? It's their kind of interesting way of of phrasing things. Right. It's your turn of phrase, not this optimized LLM that is increasingly, I think, as we start to see the way that it, it outputs, prose like a little generic.

Right. And so I know that it's, I know that it's yours because it has like little quirks about the way you think or the way that you say things or just like some language that you've come across, recently, sometimes, you know, sometimes we get this idea of like, oh, I've been using this word a lot lately, and I'm overusing it. I need to, you know, need to scale back a little bit, but, like, I'm just kind of playing around with it. And I think that there is something really playful and fun, about that, that you miss if you just let an LLM to do it for you. Yeah. To the point of vocabulary. Do you think you need a strong, big vocabulary to write?

Well. I think that, well, again, I'm a I use writing as a learning tool. Right. So I think that learning that writing is a way of building vocabulary, right? That we have when we translate our ideas. We might be working with, smaller subset of, of words. Right. Because we're just trying to get it down on the page. But then as we look through it, we realize, oh, that's not as precise as it needs to be, right? An English language is incredible because we can get such precision with, with our language. And so through that, you might realize I keep using this word, but it's really a bad fit for what I'm trying to say.

It doesn't capture what I'm trying to say. And so then maybe you go to a thesaurus, or then maybe you, you know, use a lens to kind of be like, is there something else that I'm missing here? And then, you know, it pops up a word and you're like, yes, that's the better word. And then maybe it becomes part of your lexicon. So I don't know if it's a it's a prerequisite, but I think that through writing you develop a better, you know, set of words that you can rely on. And the more you do at the, you know, the, the bigger dictionary you end up having in your mind. Yeah, absolutely. Every, every time I think about that, it reminds me of, the use of novel and scientific.

Right? Yeah, it's it was very popular for a little bit. Yeah. And it was almost an every title or something. Yeah. That's like, if that's in there, I'm not even reading it. It's, it's a, it's funny how the, how that part of the conversation with, publishing papers is. Yeah, the types of words that people are looking for. Yeah. And there are definitely fads. Yeah. Right. That there's, there are eras of different words. Definitely with so with the informative writing and or scientific writing, it's, it's you want at the end to focus on trying to say why this matters, which is, well, the namesake of the show that you're on.

To that, what are to keep for people to keep their writing focused and, and make sure that they're communicating to the reader why this matters. What should they prioritize? So I think I would prioritize two things. First, so one process and the second audience, I'll talk about audience and then go back to process. First off, absolutely keep your audience in mind. Somebody else is going to read this. The whole point, ultimately, of writing is for somebody else to know what you think. And so helping them understand the content, imagining how they might receive this on the other end, are there things you could say to make it easier to help them, navigate what you're saying to really if you want to recreate the meaning in your mind, in somebody else's mind, how can you help them do that?

How do you order information? How do you explain every information? So on and so forth. So keeping your audience in mind, I think is one of the most important things, because a lot of times we get locked in kind of an egocentric sense of, oh, I just I'm just trying to download everything I say. And I kind of like, you know, throw it on the page without really appreciating that somebody needs to to use that to recreate their ideas in their own mind. So keep audience in mind. That said, if you do that too early and you don't give yourself that time to work through the process of writing, sometimes you're thinking about your audience too soon and you get that paralysis, right?

Like, I haven't figured out what I what I want to say, and I need to use the writing process to figure that out. So use that process up to the point where you've started to figure things out, and then you consider what the audience is. So I think that that writing matters because it allows you both to help you, discern the contents of your mind, but then also communicate them so that somebody else can, have the advantage of knowing what you think with the, I guess that process of people thinking that, especially for scientific writing, you're kind of regurgitating almost just literally what you did and. Yep.

And I mean, I know and like my high school experience, that was very much like, if there's a lab report, right. That's it. I don't want to say anything past tense, like, I'm sorry, commas are in that sentence that it's like they don't want to see anything. That's very like. Colorful language or anything. It's very past tense. Only this is what happened in this order specifically. And, I, I was in shock when I, got to undergrad because then when we're doing lab reports, none of that was needed. And that was all. This better make sense to me, because I don't. I'm grading 50 of these or something, and with, with past tense, I think.

Do you think people fall into an issue with what past tense is versus, this thing called passive or active voice? I think, at least I, I've struggled with that. And I have to really make sure I'm focusing on active voice. So what would that be for people? So I feel like there are several things you just said there that that are like good fodder for thought. So in terms of that transition from high school to college. Yeah, right. That's one of the first things that then in some ways, high school is trying to give you a form, that that can kind of constrain your thinking that there is some kind of systematic process.

There's some maybe low level scientific method that that's happening just so that you're like, I need you to focus on your observations. I don't want you to jump ahead and jump to conclusions or do interpreting. I just want you to tell me what your observations are. Right. And so that's an important first step of okay. Well, I'm going to distinguish what I observe versus what I interpret. And so that serves its purpose right. Then you get into college and all of a sudden it's like I kind of assume that you know how to do that already. Like we're we've moved on a little bit. Although you might not have realized that until you get your, you know, your first grade on your assignment or something.

And then you have to start figuring out what's the appropriate style on the different parts of the of the. It's no longer necessarily a lab report, right. It might be something that is akin to a journal article. Right. You know, you're working toward that. And in your method section, your past tense in your passive voice might work really well, but because that might be something that you're most familiar with, we kind of think it's the only approach, right, that the style that you write within a method section or even a result section, that that's the style that you write all of science in. And so the passive voice, which is appropriate for that, because it doesn't matter that you're the one who carried out, the experiment, it's that this procedure was done.

The focus is on the procedure so that somebody else can replicate it, not on the fact that you're the one who carried it out. So that's appropriate there. Then you get to the introduction right where you're trying to give the context, motivate your study, explain why you did things, kind of give your reader some, some context and, and purpose. All of a sudden passive voice doesn't work at all because, well, I'm going to use your word novel. Because you're trying to do is explain like, well, how how is what you've done different from what other people have done? How is this novel from what all of the other things, that have already been done, that there really is an important distinction between what other people have said or done or published and then what you're proposing to do.

And so that distinction between what they say and what you're saying matters. And so to be able to say, well, you know, previous research has you just discovered that, you know, or findings indicate this, you really need to identify where the line is between what you're saying and what somebody else has said. And so the passive voice doesn't work anymore because the passive voice obscures agency subjectivity. And so the, you know, if you just say, you know, something in a more or passive tone, it's like, well, is that what you're saying? Or is that what somebody else said? I can't differentiate between that.

And I really need to know because I'm trying to pinpoint how you're moving things forward. What would be a a quick example of a passive versus active versus. Let's see. I'm sure you get asked that a lot. Yeah, I know now I'm terrible at generating these things. On the spot. Let's see if I can think of one. It is hypothesized that. Yeah. And you're like, well, is that a hypothesis that someone else has put forward? Is that something that you're telling me? Is that your analytical reading of the literature, or are you picking up on something that the field is collectively identified as an important hypothesis?

And so, yeah, it is hypothesize or it is it is, you know, is a, recipe for disaster. If you're trying to write an introduction of a, of a, any of anything, and, and so yes, knowing where and when to, to use passive voice or where and when to use past tense versus present tense. You know, you need to know what you're right, what purpose you're writing for. And that varies within a scientific document from section to section. And that is not always communicated effectively, you know. And so a lot of people arrive and they're kind of expected to have figured that out, maybe by osmosis or just by, you know, observation of patterns.

But those patterns are not, very clear. They're not transparent in what you're writing because you're reading some of those papers, you're in your courses, you're trying to understand all the material. You don't have time to really notice those kinds of patterns. So then when you go to write your own, the things that you need to know to write it well are not the things that you've been paying attention to. So that that's where that's where I come in. Yeah. So just so it's out there, an active voice version of it is hypothesized that a lot of times you're seeing a lot more active voice, first person, active voice.

You know, we hypothesize that, or sometimes people are uncomfortable with the first person. And so they'll say, you know, this study hypothesizes that, I mean, there are pros and cons for each one of them. But to make it very clear that the hypothesis is internal to these, the this publication by these authors, as opposed to, you know, they hypothesize that. Right. Like, there might have been a previous publication, you know, a review article where they came up with a new kind of a new way of thinking about things, and you're giving credit to the authors of that review article and are building on what they're saying.

It helps you keep track of authorship. It helps you keep track of your own ideas about, well, what is your contribution? How do you delineate what you are saying from what other people have said? So that you can, you know, make sure that you are taking appropriate ownership for your intellectual property, respecting what other people have contributed, and kind of identify the scope of what you're writing more effectively. So overall, with, scientific writing or this more informative writing, what what do you think are the common misconceptions that you, that you'd like to clear up about science writing? Science, right.

Yeah. Misconceptions about science writing. One of them is that writing is really something you do at the end. Right. And this is not a new idea. This is not my idea. Right? That that writing is really something that you should be doing alongside all of the other scientific work that you do. And so don't wait till the end to start putting it together. Don't wait for the deadline. But to create, to cultivate a writing practice alongside all of the other work that you do, actually, I think helps those, those isolated moments of a publication or a grant, you know, makes you it makes you better prepared to do those things if you have some kind of writing alongside the work that you do.

And so thinking about it as something like, oh, I'm done with this, but now I just have to write it up and, you know, it, it becomes overwhelming, that if you have a writing practice alongside what you're doing and that it doesn't have to be that you're constantly writing a journal article, right? But there is some kind of writing that you're engaging with. Along the way, I think makes it a lot easier than feeling like you have this behemoth of a task at the end, and that standing in your way of doing other things. I know we can't get rid of that idea entirely, but but I think it can help. Also, you know, the fact that writing there's something actually intellectually important about writing, and I think in the sciences, I think rightly so, a lot of us are drawn to the actual work of, of, you know, the, the, the carrying out of studies of the doing of research.

But there is something valuable that the writing can contribute to that to help you figure out what you think, and that we can adopt a less adversarial approach in that if you can figure out how to make writing work for you, then it might be a little bit less painful. I think a lot of scientists don't like to write, and I but I also think that I don't know if I don't want to make any promises that writing is ever going to be easy, but I think it can be easier. And so, yeah, to the, you know, a misconception that that writing always has to be hard or that, you know, it's it's just kind of this procedural thing that you have to do to wrap things up that it could be actually something you enjoy, that you could make space in your life for writing, being something you could enjoy.

Or at least there are things about it that you can enjoy and figure out a way to make that happen more often. Well said. And yeah, it sounds like an important habit for people to work for. It's, it's definitely a habit that takes time and effort to cultivate. So we've reached the TLDL section for the Too Long Didn't Listen section, which I mean, throughout this conversation, you've you've really hit the why this matters and everything you're saying. Yeah. But for our audience, can you give the listeners, the Why THIS Matters for what we've been talking about? And you know how, writing and scientific writing is, you know, moving forward and everything.

So I think the reason why writing matters is that it really is a tool for people to learn more about what they think, to push their thinking forward. It's really a way of engaging with reasoning and thinking as opposed to just being this, translational procedural thing that we have to accomplish just to get things done. So to see writing really as, a way of differentiating the thoughts that you have of even accomplishing or creating ideas that you didn't think you could have had before, thinking about writing in that way more as a, a, a thought partner, as, as a way of, of building and and moving your own thinking along.

I think the why does this matter is because writing and thinking go hand in hand. That that's really what it boils down to. And, and to use writing as a way to support your thinking, I think is the most important way to approach writing. Wonderful. Well, from myself and all our listeners, thanks for joining us today. Great. So to remind everybody we had, we have Adrienne Tierney here today, the a lecturer from the Writing and Communications Center at MIT. And I've been your host, Daniel Braconnier here. Thanks for listening. Chat with you next time.