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Writing Professionally

Write what matters. If you don't care about what you're writing, neither will your readers.

Judy Reeves

I'm not a very good writer, but I'm an excellent rewriter.

James Michener

When people write professionally in the social, educational, or health sciences, they are telling a story about people. But scientists are people, too, complete with individual personalities, likes and dislikes, and ordinary human qualities. Their personalities affect what they do and how they do it. As such, "science writing is not so much about science, but about people-human problems and their solutions, curiosity and discovery" (Holland, 2011, para. 4). In this book, you will learn how to convey your thoughts on the important problems and solutions related to people.

It would be hard to overstate how important it is to write effectively. Writing constitutes one of the "3 Rs" of a basic education: reading, writing and 'rithmetic. In the world of business, success is dependent, in part, on effective writing. For high-level positions, "writing is a 'threshold skill' for both employment and promotion" (College Board, 2004, p. 3). In one survey, many companies noted that writing was important in hiring. One respondent asserted that, "in most cases, writing ability could be your ticket in . or it could be your ticket out" (College Board, 2004, p. 3). Potential employees who do not write well are unlikely to be hired and, if they are hired, they are unlikely to be promoted. Effective writing can also be important for empowering people and creating communities (Parks, n.d.). In the end, good writing will continue to be a critical skill in any professional career (Laurinavicius, 2017).

In a student's progress toward advanced training, graduate school admission may also depend on writing effectiveness. Graduate programs routinely request essays as part of the application process. This writing is "often used to make final selections of students with similar GPAs and standardized test scores. If you are on the borderline of being accepted and the admissions committee could go either way, a sterling essay can increase your chances of success considerably" (American Psychological Association, 2001).

More immediately, the type of writing presented in this book focuses on the technical style presented in the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (American Psychological Association, 2020). In the end, you will develop skill in writing in APA Style, presenting your ideas with clarity and logic in a manner that will engage the reader. This book provides guidance on creating appropriately formatted papers, but you are likely to find that you become better at it by actually doing it rather than just reading about it. The organization of this book should facilitate development of your skills as you actually apply the guidelines presented here (Boysen, 2019).

Most of us find people interesting and are eager to learn why they behave the way they do. But readers do not want to fight through dull and meaningless writing. As writers, our biggest hurdle involves turning complex, technical concepts into prose that others can appreciate.

Writing successfully is not easy. It requires knowledge of the topic we are addressing; judicious selection of the best words, phrases, and sentences; and editing and revising what we have composed. If there were a magical formula that we could use to generate good prose, everybody would succeed in communicating even complex and hard-to-understand ideas. If you have read the work of scientists, though, you will have discovered that, much of the time, scientific writing is dense and impenetrable. Many writers hide interesting concepts inside packages of dull prose.

Furthermore, when you write a paper, not only do you have to make your points clearly, but you have to do it in APA Style. This book will focus on writing effectively within those technical constraints. But it is important to remember that the first goal of any writing project is to communicate effectively. Writing that doesn't inform the reader is as bad as (or worse than) no writing at all. It is wise to remember that technical writing doesn't have to be obscure; that often occurs because scientists pay little attention to writing style. In fact, some research indicates that research summaries that undergraduates write are actually clearer than the summaries that professionals write (Brown, 2018). This book is a hopeful attempt to keep you from falling prey to confusing prose.

How Does Professional Writing Differ from Other Kinds of Writing?

If you are trying to write like a professional, your style will be unlike much of the writing that you have done in the past. When we write professionally, we usually attempt to convey specific information with a great deal of precision, minimizing ambiguity and the possibility of misunderstanding. The adage to say what you mean and mean what you say is highly appropriate for technical writing. You want your reader to understand the points you believe are important, and you want the reader to know exactly what you intend to say.

In other forms of writing, the emphasis may be on crafting artistic prose. The writer attempts to impress the reader with both content and style. The words that Shakespeare wrote for Macbeth illustrate the point. Macbeth lamented that life "is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." These poetic words convey Macbeth's despair. However, Shakespeare's style would not be appropriate for a scientist because the style of science is to be straightforward and unambiguous so the reader does not have to puzzle through the words to find meaning in them.

Psychologists often receive training in how to write objective, scientific papers. Unfortunately, the writing style is often "bloodless" (Josselson & Lieblich, 1996, p. 651), meaning that it is not particularly engaging. Sommer (2006) has encouraged psychologists to learn to write with color and style for lay audiences without sacrificing accuracy. He also implied that the writing style in academic journals need not be dreary.

In scientific writing, we focus on the content of the message. The point is not to impress the reader with the prose, but to render the prose invisible while making the content foremost. This type of writing can be as difficult to do well as literary writing because you need to be concise without omitting important information; you need to choose your words carefully so they engage the reader without obscuring your point; you need to say enough to let your reader understand your message without being repetitive.

Another difference among the various types of writing is that, when we write scientifically or technically, we generally rely on a vocabulary specific to the topic at hand. Professionals understand this wording, but others are not likely to be as conversant with the terminology. This is one of the reasons that scientific writing has the reputation of being incomprehensible-you need to know the jargon. (The concepts are also complex and may be hard to understand, which does not help.) Actually, technical terms are helpful because they let us communicate complex ideas clearly in a few words, although if you do not know the meanings of the words, the prose is meaningless or, at best, difficult.

Using APA Style

A further difference between scientific or technical writing and less formal writing is that, in science, authors typically follow a specific format in preparing reports. In this book, you will learn the guidelines that appear in the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (American Psychological Association, 2020), commonly just called APA Style. To begin with, in APA Style, research reports usually include seven sections, as described in Table 1.1.

Table 1.1 Typical Sections in an APA-Style Research Report

The path that you will take in writing a paper for a class parallels that of submitting a manuscript to a journal. Most of the time, if a writer submits to a journal editor a manuscript that deviates greatly from APA Style, the editor may reject the manuscript immediately as unsuitable for publication. In some cases, editors work with authors so that the final version of the manuscript is consistent with APA Style (Brewer et al., 2001). Similarly, in a class,...