On Becoming a Writer: Lessons from 15 Years of Academic Writing

In this post:

• Why I’ve always thought of myself as a writer, even though I’m trained as a social psychologist
• How lessons about writing accumulate slowly over time
• Why academic writing doesn’t have to be boring

I’m employed as a social psychologist, but deep down, I’ve always thought of myself as a writer.

In high school, I had an English teacher named Mrs. Wagner. She gave me the first real compliment about my writing I can remember. In her class, I wrote something about the feeling I got as summer faded to fall in central Indiana. September days started cool but ended hot. When the cross-country team I was on ran to a little country graveyard and back, we felt the season turn. By October, the sun was less intense and bugs were coming out of the fields as farmers harvested their crops. Evidently, Mrs. Wagner enjoyed my description. Her compliment planted a seed.

When I started college, I found that writing was hard. In the composition courses required for my degree, I wrote about topics I’d never thought about: the history of the Advanced Placement test, the International Baccalaureate program, the death penalty, gun control… whatever was assigned. I sat at my computer for hours, struggling to put words on the page because I was struggling to think. Somehow, I muddled through, and a few years later, I was shocked to bump into my professor. He said he remembered me for the quality of my writing.

Halfway through college I decided to be a research psychologist. In class and the lab I worked in, I heard that part of being a good psychologist was knowing how to communicate; good scientific writing and good public speaking were part of the job. So, I picked up a book about academic writing. Then another. And another. I enrolled in multiple elective writing courses where I fell in love with a form on nonfiction called literary journalism, the kind of stuff you find in The New Yorker. As a graduate student, I had the time and space to practice. I read more books, attended workshops, and considered every scientific paper, manuscript, class assignment, review, and revision as a chance to improve.

It was a worthwhile investment. Although I was hired at CloudResearch to help run research studies, writing has been a big part of my job. I’ve written blogs, newsletters, webpage copy, pillar pages, research guides, marketing brochures, promotional emails, knowledge base articles, scientific papers, and a textbook. After 15 years of trying to write well, I felt I had knowledge to share. Some of that knowledge is below. The rest is in the final chapter of Research in the Cloud.

What makes academic writing effective? Effective academic writing is clear, direct, and structured for the reader. It uses simple sentences, avoids unnecessary jargon, and puts ideas before credentials. The goal is communication, not performance.

Writing Is Really Rewriting

There is nothing novel about saying that the essence of writing is revising. You can find this advice everywhere. But what the advice often fails to convey is just how much revision is necessary.

Every project has different constraints. You seldom get to revise something indefinitely. But much of the writing I have been most pleased with in my life was the result of somewhere between three and five rounds of revision. They have also often benefitted from at least one long pause, where I set the project aside for a while.

If the first draft is intended to get the ideas onto the page, revising is when you can intentionally implement different elements of style. It’s where you can really produce the writing you are proud of. With enough time and practice, your early drafts will start to show more of your style and personality.

Simple Sentences Aren’t Simple-Minded

The idea that simple writing is good writing came naturally to me. I’m the product of a tiny public high school and an unheralded undergraduate institution. When I read that good writing is simple, free of clutter, and more reliant on short, familiar words rather than long and obscure ones, I thought: “No problem. That’s just how the people I know talk.” What I didn’t expect was that I would have to fight to write this way.

Throughout my education, people repeatedly told me that my writing was too informal. Sometimes a reviewer would comment that a paper was “well-written, but too informal.” At other times, I heard that the writing wasn’t “scientific” enough. I once had a co-author recommend that we not write “In this paper we propose a simple hypothesis” because people might think our ideas weren’t important. When I pointed out that my writing was following in the wake of successful researchers in my field, I was told, “When you become Dan Gilbert, you can write like Dan Gilbert.”

I disagree. Clarity isn’t a weakness. Simplicity doesn’t equal unimportant. Both are a gift to the reader. The best academic writers use simple structures because they’ve thought hard enough to make their ideas accessible. It’s the convoluted and jargon-laden prose we should cast a leery eye on.

How I Learned to Write: Imitation

I spent more than one afternoon in graduate school reading the opening of every article written by Thomas Gilovich. Then I did the same for Nick Epley, Kurt Gray, Jane Risen, Juliana Schroeder and many others. Each time, I was looking for something specific: things I could imitate.

In the book Writing to Learn, William Zinsser extolls the virtue of imitation. He says, “Writing is learned by imitation. I learned to write mainly by reading writers who were doing the kind of writing I wanted to do and by trying to figure out how they did it.” That is what I was doing, reading good academic writers. But I didn’t stop there. I routinely read outside of academic journals and looked for ways to learn from good writers.

If you’re worried that imitation feels like plagiarism, don’t be. Imitation is a form of practice. It’s like learning to shoot a basketball by analyzing Steph Curry’s form, learning to play an instrument by playing other people’s songs, or learning to paint by studying the masters. Writers learn by studying other writers. Over time, the imitation fades and what’s left is your own voice, informed by what you’ve absorbed.

Grab the Reader’s Attention (and Don’t Let Go)

Readers decide in the first sentence whether to keep going. This is true for journal articles, blog posts, and everything in between. A strong opening earns attention and compels the reader to continue. A weak opening loses it.

I’ve learned to spend disproportionate time on openings. What’s the question I’m answering? What’s the observation that makes someone care? Can I start with something concrete—a fact, a moment, a puzzle—instead of something bland or abstract? The rest of the piece matters, of course, but only if people read past the first paragraph.

Academic Writing Doesn’t Have to Be Boring

This might be the most important lesson. Somewhere along the way, academics decided that serious work requires serious prose. Then, another group took the preference toward formality and buried it under illegible jargon. But here’s a secret: there’s nothing that says you have to write that way.

The best scientific writers are clear, direct, and enjoyable to read because they write for humans. The goal is communication, and communication works best when readers don’t have to fight through your sentences to find your ideas. Don’t believe me? Check out Adam Mastroianni’s page. It follows almost none of the conventions for reporting scientific work, but it engages and informs anyway. That might be why it lit up social media when he published the article a few years ago.

What You’ll Learn in Chapter 16

Chapter 16 of Research in the Cloud is something of a pet project. My co-authors let me include it because I wanted to share what I’ve learned about writing over the years. To make it relevant, we decided to also give advice about what often gets omitted from the Methods sections that report about online research. Thus, the chapter is divided into two parts.

The first walks through how to write a Method section for behavioral research, with special attention to the requirements of online studies: how to describe participants recruited from online platforms, how to report data quality procedures, how to handle the details that make your work transparent and replicable.

The second offers general writing advice, principles that apply whether you’re writing a scientific journal article, a thesis, or a blog post. I’ve borrowed this advice from teachers I admire: William Zinsser, Paul Silvia, Robert Kail, and others. The essence of what they preach is to write clearly, follow a simple sentence structure, start strong, end stronger, and always remember there is a person on the other end of the transaction. If you do that, your readers will thank you.

This post is part of a series exploring the chapters of Research in the Cloud: An Introduction to Modern Methods of Behavioral Science by Aaron Moss, Jonathan Robinson, and Leib Litman. Read Chapter 16 here.