Just as with any type of hard work, you will not succeed unless you practice regularly. In his book How to Write a Lot: A Practical Guide to Productive Academic Writing, Paul Silvia says that for some, “it’s easier to embalm the dead than to write an article about it”. As stated in Hayes’ framework for the study of writing: “It is a generative activity requiring motivation, and it is an intellectual activity requiring cognitive processes and memory”. It is a very difficult process of intense concentration and brain work. Whether you have written 100 papers or you are struggling with your first, starting the process is the most difficult part unless you have a rigid writing schedule. Specifically, I will focus on the best approaches to start a scientific paper, tips for writing each section, and the best revision strategies. In this paper, I will discuss the issues related to the writing process of a scientific paper. How does the writing process work? How can you fit your writing into a daily schedule packed with experiments? What section should you start with? What distinguishes a good research paper from a bad one? How should you revise your paper? These and many other questions buzz in your head and keep you stressed. You have not written anything for a while (lab reports do not count), and you feel you have lost your stamina. Yet days pass, and you cannot force yourself to sit down to write. Your colleagues think you are ready to write a paper, and your lab mates tease you about your “slow” writing progress. Your pipette feels like an extension of your hand, and running western blots has become part of your daily routine, similar to brushing your teeth. You generated an enormous amount of interesting data. You have been struggling with your project for a year.
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