Published!

I finally got something published.  I'm only a second author but my name is now out there.  It doesn't come up when I simply Google myself but maybe one day it will.

Grant Writing 101

Is everyone's first grant writing experience not very fun?  I submitted my first grant just before winter break after two months of working on it.  I didn't know what to expect when I started the process, but it certainly didn't go as I planned.


I was trying to stick to the tips outlined by the Chronicle of Higher Education, the typical be concise, proof-read, have others proof-read, start early, know the grant agency, and so forth.  That didn't really happen.

My team (this ground was written by a group of four-ish) started about two months early, technically, but didn't really spend a lot of time working on it until the few weeks before the deadline.  This lead to a lot of last-minute changes and not a lot of proof-reading.  In fact, aside from the four of us reading it, only two outside people read the grant.

In terms of knowing the agency (the EPA in this case), my team looked through the accepted proposals for this grant from previous years trying to figure out if ours would be a good fit and what the agency was looking for.  In this regard I think we did well.

I think our proposal was concise, but I'm not very objective about it.  However, I'm not sure if the grant flowed together very well, I think you could tell that multiple people worked on it when it should really read as one author.  I'm glad the grant proposal didn't do the items from "How to Fail in Grant Writing," items such use lots of acronyms without defining them, or don't state goals/objectives/hypotheses.  That part of the grant was done correctly. 

I thought this was really interesting though:

63 percent of graduate students who did not receive a grant had only one to three people read their proposals. But 21 percent of the successful graduate students had seven or more people review their grant proposal before submission. Postdocs seemed to have recognized the importance of this strategy, as well, as 32 percent reported that four or more people had reviewed their proposal before submission.

- from Grant-Writing Tips for Graduate Students

Nice statistical evidence on the importance of having people read your grants before you submit.

The last piece of advice from the Chronicle's tip article was "don't take rejection too seriously."  I have yet to receive the official papers saying the proposal was rejected but I don't doubt they're on its way.  I'm lucky that I don't have to worry about funding at all but I wouldn't mind trying to apply for other grants in the future.  I can use all the practice I can get!

And Then You Edit

So you've written a paper. Phew.

You diligently carved out time every day to sit down and pen a few lines of prose. You paced the floor, you muttered to yourself, you bounced ideas off your colleagues, you did your best to manipulate Microsoft Word into doing your bidding. But before you submit the paper, before you hand it over to someone else to read, you've got to edit it yourself.

After I finished writing my thesis for my masters I was exhausted. Hours were spent hunched over my keyboard pecking away. Candles were burned at both ends. Cliches were tossed about. But read my own thesis?

"I know my thesis like the back of my hand! Why would I need to read it?"

Well...I tend to write like I talk. I think most people do this, it's fairly common in the age of social media/internet. Unfortunately, the writing-like-you-talk style of writing is not ideal when it comes to things like papers for publication...or my thesis. So of course I needed to read my thesis but I honestly didn't do that great of a job reading through it. It's tough to read your own work when you feel like you have it all memorized.

When I saw this article on the Chronicle of Higher Education's website about editing yourself I was psyched. "Perhaps I can find some tips for the paper I'm having a tough time crafting," I thought. And I did but not as many as I had hoped for. The two main tips from the article are in italics below, emphasis mine.

All I can do is urge [you] to pay attention to well-written works in [your] own field, to read not just for content, but also for the nuances of style, and to steal the tools and tricks that good writers use.

I recently read a great journal article about microbial desalination cells whose text seems to follow such a logical manner I can't help but admire it. I could probably do something similar for my topic.

If you don't remember the basics—like what a semicolon does—you might want to remind yourself. If you don't know the difference between further and farther, lay and lie, figure it out (or go lie down until you do). If you are prone to comma splices (as I am), be aware of that and make conscientious choices. Those are not trivial issues. If we don't take the form seriously, the content of the message won't get delivered. There's no point in writing if you're not going to be understood.

Over the weekend I reviewed a paper that was full of mistakes. On one hand the writer of that paper was an English as a second language person and an undergraduate student. I'm not saying that ESL or undergraduate students don't know how to write, I'm saying that I think it's harder to write a paper in that situation. On the other hand a lot of the mistakes were formatting ones (e.g. "Figure 1.title of figure here" vs "Figure 2. The blah blah shows blah.") which I would consider mistakes that anyone could catch regardless of language or years in school.

I've been using Guide to Technical Editing: Discussion, Dictionary, and Exercises as my go-to style guide but that's simply because it was the book that the "Writing and Editing for Technical Publishing" class I took last year used. This article recommends The Elements of Style (4th Edition) plus Style: Toward Clarity and Grace (Chicago Guides to Writing, Editing, and Publishing), and a four-and-a-half star Amazon rating can't be too far off. The article goes on to name other reference books for writing and editing such as Economical Writing, Second Edition and On Writing: 10th Anniversary Edition: A Memoir of the Craft.

These five books aren't the only ones out there. Are there any must-have style guides that you use?

Origin vs Sigma Plot

Poll time! Which do you use for making your publication-ready graphs/charts/tables: Origin or Sigma Plot?

I honestly haven't made much progress in my paper writing though I have finished off one of the grants already. What I have done however, is assemble a bunch of data that I can turn into publication-ready figures...as soon as I figure out which software to use.

This would look good in a paper...right?*

My advisor uses Sigma Plot, a co-worker uses Origin. At this point I'm leaning towards Origin because they have a student version that I could purchase for $50/year. I didn't see a student version for Sigma Plot, in fact the cheapest version I saw was $499 (ouch!). Ideally work would get me a license for creating publication quality figures but at this point I'm going to assume that I will be footing the bill.

So, what should it be: Origin or Sigma Plot?

*Not actual data. I know it looks good (ha) but I really made this in Paint in less than five minutes.


UPDATE (6/14/2011):  I've had some time to use both Sigma Plot and Origin now (my Sigma Plot license expired any my company decided not to renew it) and I wanted to give some more information that someone will hopefully find helpful.  I've only created very basic graphs with both software, graphs one could create in Microsoft Excel but look better in professional software.

I found Sigma Plot easier to use right off the bat.  I was able to copy and paste my MS Excel data into Sigma Plot and create a graph within a matter of minutes without reading the manual - pretty awesome.  When it came time to stack graphs, make a secondary axis, add error bars, etc. I had to pull out the manual and found the process rather painful.

Origin I could not use without reading the manual.  Time consuming and tedious, it took me a ridiculous amount of time to get my data in Excel and an even longer amount of time to figure out how to plot on the secondary axis.  Origin isn't all bad - once I got the hang of it, Origin was really simple to use.

What Editors Want

I'd like to share another article on writing that I found through Julie from A Very Focused Blog About School and Work. Julie is the person who originally introduced me to The Chronicle of Higher Education and subsequently the article on How to Write Less Badly.

This article is called "What Editors Want," a self-explanatory title in my opinion. I'm actively working on two grant proposals and one paper right now and I want my work to be as polished as possible. This article offers several key pieces of advice as to how to make editors happy; after all, they're the ones who have the final decision as to if your work is going to be accepted or not.

If you're writing something to be published:

1. Know the journal you are attempting to publish in
   
2. Proof-read, proof-read, proof-read!
3. Don't deviate from the style guide

The article has more pieces of advice but those are the main ones. I really like reading articles like these because although the information they convey is very basic it is still very applicable. Proof-read your e-mails, proof-read your tweets, proof-read your status updates. If you're limited to 140 characters don't exceed that amount. If you have a graduate school blog don't post about your grievances with city parking tickets (oops).

The article does end with a positive suggestion: Develop a healthy attitude toward rejection.

It's necessary to stay sane.