- Write your paper in 20 days — starting August 3rd.
(*cough cough* ahem… bullshit.) I learned this the hard way when I started writing my first research paper.
I searched relentlessly for resources that would help me, but all of the advice I found was mostly useless and just confused me more, like:
-but wtf is a compelling abstract? How do I know what is compelling about my research? How do I write in a compelling way?
-How do I know if my logic makes sense to others? How do I know the best ordering for my particular research?
-Um, HOW do I make writing into a funnel? What do I funnel from and to? (They better mean a funnel cake)
-How broad is too broad? Won’t readers be annoyed if I tell them things they already know?
-What makes writing dense and difficult? How much detail do I actually need? Won’t “dumbing down” my writing prevent editors and reviewers from taking me less seriously as an expert?
Featured Workshop
None of the writing advice I found helped me. Instead, I procrastinated for 6 months — stressing, full of guilt and shame the entire time.
I hit a low point one morning when I heard my PI coming in to work, and I knew that if he saw me, he was going to ask how writing was going (it wasn’t).
So I panicked, and did the mature thing – I hid.
And as I stood in the dark closet, holding my breath while my professor walked past the slotted window, I swore I would never feel like this again.
The turnaround
Good communication isn’t a genetic trait. It’s a skill that can be learned.
The stress of that morning launched me into panic-writing a disorganized and nonsensical draft (that my professor immediately rewrote *sigh*), and then I immediately started a personal mission to figure out exactly HOW to write a great research paper.
I took every course I could find, read every resource I could get my hands on, and started reading tons of high-impact papers in my research field. I even studied language, communication, and psychology to figure out what made some papers interesting and convincing, while others are dense and boring.
I wanted to learn exactly how to make my research shine through my writing.
The turnaround
Good communication isn’t a genetic trait. It’s a skill that can be learned.
The turnaround
Good communication isn’t a genetic trait. It’s a skill that can be learned.
Hi, I’m Kaycie — and I’m making it easy to write research papers and grant proposals so you can get back to what really matters: your research.
After 15+ years of studying academic writing and 1000s of papers later, I’ve developed clear, structured formulas for exactly how to turn your research into a great research paper.
These formulas are currently helping academics around the world write about their research.
And they are doing it
And now I’m putting these formulas into the hands of researchers who need them the most.