Professor David Rovnyak on the labors of writing as a chemist

David Rovnyak, Professor of Chemistry

It’s Labor Day weekend, which I am going to celebrate by….writing.  My kids are off basking in the glow of grandparents, giving me the chance to get some manuscripts out the door.  Writing this reflection will be a little victory, and a bit of harmless procrastination to boot.

I write the way most chemists probably do.  I prepare the figures first and drop them in to a document and write. I use the figures as my outline.  No figures?  No paper.  Don’t even start.

I write the abstract first, and I completely rewrite it at the end.  Yup, it’s wasted time, but it's an aspirational statement of the paper, it gets me going, and I like to write linearly from start to finish.  The introduction is brutal: have we cited everyone? Did we show why this is exciting to us while staying formal?  How much theory do we review?  Have we crafted our little puzzle piece to advance the scientific enterprise? Next come the results, discussion and conclusion, which are the fastest and most fun to write.  We all love to talk and write about our data.  In fact, I go back to them whenever I need a lift.

I always involve students in the writing process.  Writing the introduction is a good challenge for them, or I may outline a section and have them fill it in.  They can take a stab at the abstract, and they should always be proofreading.  I am so thankful for many students over the years who are gifted proofreaders and have helped me become a better writer while they are learning the ropes of scientific writing themselves.  You know who you are.  Most satisfying of all, is that the first drafts of many figures were made by the students, and it’s a thrill for them (and me) to see their graphics in print.  

Unfortunately, the first draft is a mere shadow of the final paper, and we all know it. It has to be better for a lot of reasons, pride being one, but here's another that worries me a lot.  Every month, thousands of scientific articles appear in print and online and it’s getting worse. We desperately need an Artificial Intelligence that reads these thousands of articles and generates meta-research from them.  That day is coming, sooner than we might think.  But while we wait, I want the paper to read as well as possible, not for the eyes of some silicon life form years from now, but for all of us struggling to keep up with the state of the art.  

I've learned many of my weaknesses, and if I have any advice here, it’s to confront your weaknesses, too. I look for repetitive writing, run-on sentences, and all of the other writing sins I thought I had atoned for in the past.  It takes far more time to revise the first draft as it took to write it. 

Developing a more structured, deliberate and logical approach to writing that first draft is the area I work on the most. True, many of us hone the core-dump, stream-of-consciousness technique into a strange, but often very effective, art of scientific writing. It’s important to recognize that early, more spontaneous writing will likely need laborious revision before a draft nears completion.

And then it ends where it began: the abstract.  I know that Mom and a few specialists are the only ones to read the fine print.  But most readers rightfully expect to get a perfect summary of our hard-fought research from the 250-word-limit abstract and the now ubiquitous table-of-contents figure, a masterpiece of minimalist but information-rich graphic design that I fantasize would make even Edward Tufte blush a little.

When it is all done I make false promises like I do after Thanksgiving meals that I’ll be more disciplined next time, and we steel ourselves for the peer reviewers who will ask us to do it all over again.

When not writing, David Rovnyak enjoys attending conferences with students and meeting alumni.  Pictured, at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Institute, from left to right: Levi Craft, B.S. Eng '17, Ed Peltzer, Ph.D., BU '72, Matthew Miele, M.S. '15, David Rovnyak.

Bio: David Rovnyak joined the Bucknell Department of Chemistry in 2003 after earning a Ph.D. in physical chemistry from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and performing post-doctoral study at the Harvard Medical School.  His teaching and research interests include biophysical and bioanalytical chemistry.   Students in his lab perform research in areas such as bile chemistry, protein structure, signal processing, as well as the metabolism of humans and honey bees.

Molly O'Brien-Foelsch on achieving flow against the odds

Molly O'Brien-Foelsch, Director of University Marketing & Web Content

You know the feeling – the floaty one, in which the words want to land on the page faster than your fingers can move. You forget your surroundings. When you come back to earth, you find you have a decent first draft that you can somewhat effortlessly refine until you have a piece that impresses your readers and even yourself. It doesn’t happen often enough for me, or I’m guessing for any writer, that experience we call flow.

I used to be pretty good at finding flow. In college, I’d settle on the floor by my dorm-room bed with a half-gallon of grape Gatorade by my side and the Talking Heads’ greatest hits cassette playing on my boom box. Since my roommate was a lab-bound engineering major, I always had a few uninterrupted hours to sink into a rare, delicious writing trance.

It’s harder to achieve flow now that I work regular hours in a professional office, manage a small staff, and have tons of emails to address, along with IM’s, meetings and office drop-ins — few of which have anything to do with the writing projects that pepper my extensive to-do list.

And then there is the pressure of the public nature of my work. It’s easy to get writer’s block when I know my writing will be posted online or printed in a magazine or brochure with a circulation of 50,000. The readers themselves don’t make it easy, either. I’m writing for an audience of very smart, very critical faculty, administrators, alumni, parents, students and, gulp, teenagers. Sure, the stakes make my writing better, but they also tend to make me second-guess myself at nearly every turn. Yet when I look back over my professional portfolio, I see that I have, despite these obstacles, managed to achieve flow. The examples are many: the speech the president praised, the web story that garnered some great web traffic, the profile that a faculty member barely edited – these are the outcomes that benefit Bucknell and satisfy the writer in my heart.

So how do I get there? Here are a few strategies I use:

1) Define a goal.

Sometimes I receive a request for a writing project with no guidelines other than “This person needs to speak for 10 minutes” or “We need a blurb about Bucknell.” No pressure! If I find myself filling space with fluff or clichés, I take that as a signal that I have work to do before I write. I consider the needs of the speaker and the audience: What do they need to know about? What do they want to know about? Are there behaviors or actions I want to inspire? I consider, too, the context: Are there ties with historic or current events? Are there recurring themes that I can expand upon or present in a new light?

This kind of pre-writing work happens, for instance, with the faculty stories my team and I produce. We can’t produce a compelling story or effectively convey a main point by smooshing every topic from a 45-minute interview into 400 words. Instead, we think more abstractly about how some or all of those topics relate to each other. Did the interviewee’s body language and tempo reveal a particular passion? What aspects of their work relate to what prospective students and parents want to know during their college search? Are there any hot topics in the media that align with this person’s scholarship or teaching? Is there an emotional component to the work? A humorous one?

To keep my writing sharp, I have to do much more than write: I must stay abreast of issues in higher education and admissions; keep up with University news and faculty and student achievements; attend events and lectures and luncheons; get to know students; and learn about Bucknell’s history and strategic plans for the future. Flow doesn’t come from nothing — achieving it requires not only “mind work” but also the background work, legwork and mindfulness of continual research.

2) Mind map.

Once I have a clear objective or theme, I often sketch out a mind map to build an outline and argument. I’ve used software, but right now I like paper and pen. I put my central idea in the middle, write supporting ideas at the end of the spider’s arms, and fill in the details from there. Sometimes the entire structure of a piece materializes right there on the map. Then all that’s left to do is flesh out the piece.

3) Develop rituals.

I have a routine that works much like having a bedtime ritual did for me as a kid. It gets me in the right frame of mind to concentrate. Since I’ve become leery of ingesting too much purple food coloring, I’ve replaced grape Gatorade with Irish breakfast tea, and I now prefer silence to the Talking Heads. When I’ve got a big writing project to attack, I clean off my desk, organize, then shut off my email and IM, brew a big cup of tea and close my office door.

I have also experimented with writing at different times of the day. Alas, I get revved up at about 3:45 in the afternoon, much too close to quitting time. Weirdly, my best editing and rewriting time is before 7 a.m. I hate mornings, but when there’s a messy draft in need of help, that’s when I have to do it.

4) Do yoga.

Yoga really helps me concentrate, even if a day or two has elapsed since my last session. Writing flow and a good savasana feel nearly identical to me, and even a few ujjayi breaths and a couple of downward-facing dogs help get the juices flowing.

5) Relocate.

Sometimes a change in scenery or atmosphere is the key to the click. I sit in the comfy chair in the corner of my office, go to 7th St. Café or Cherry Alley, or take a walk around campus and chat with a few people to see if that frees up the words. A hot shower steams the words loose from my brain when I’m really struggling with a project.

6) When all else fails, deconstruct and reconstruct.

I save this approach for really high-stakes or complex projects that aren’t cooperating because a) it’s a lot of work and b) my coworkers tend to think I’ve lost it if they see me doing this: I print the thing out and then slice it to bits – with a real scissors. I spread the pieces out on my office floor and rearrange them, categorize them with different colors of highlighters and Sharpies (A, B, C, etc.) and toss out some of the slips. I refer to the remaining slips to revise the digital draft, add new text to fill in the gaps the process has revealed, and line edit from there. This opposite-of-flow approach is a dramatic way to kill my darlings and develop a draft that doesn’t make me cringe, but when all else fails, it works.

  

Molly O'Brien-Foelsch M'98 is Director of University Marketing & Web Content within Bucknell's Division of Communications. She has worked at Bucknell for more than 11 years and has experience in writing admissions recruitment materials across media, presidential remarks, video storyboards, faculty stories, grant proposals, and other written pieces that communicate the value of a Bucknell education across audiences. She holds a master's degree in English from Bucknell and her bachelor's degree in English from Cedar Crest College. She lives in Milton, Pa., with her husband, Brian, their rescued German shepherd mix, Greta, and two cats. See her portfolio here (you may have to copy and paste, sorry!):   https://www.linkedin.com/in/mollyobrienfoelsch/.