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Moreover, it’s not just the young dogs who can be taught new tricks. As I hope to convince you in this book, the essential skills can be taught. The good news is that being a better writer, whether a student or a scientist with years of experience, does not require a revelation, merely an open mind. Unfortunately, not everyone has the benefit of such mentoring. Throughout my career, mentoring by Dan, my other advisors, and my colleagues was essential to my development as a scientist and a writer. Wherever that revelation came from, Eloquent Science would not have happened without that moment. Subsequent revisions went much more smoothly, and the manuscript made it easily through the review process and was published. Finally, something snapped inside and clarity came: I understood what he was trying to tell me about transition, coherence, and precision, and it made complete sense. Sometimes we were frustrated by each others’ stubbornness: me by his insistence to do things his way and he by my resistance to learning. Not all of Dan’s lessons I embraced immediately, however. My schooling was severe: fifteen one-hour-long phone calls where we would go through the draft together- one section at a time, sentence by sentence. thesis, one of my coadvisors, Dan Keyser, and I discussed revisions by phone while he lived in upstate New York and I in Oklahoma. In writing the journal article that resulted from my Ph.D. In other words, being challenged would result in my intellectual growth- an academic restatement of Nietzsche’s “What does not destroy me, makes me stronger.” Consequently, I asked to be withdrawn from Gifted and Talented English in the eighth grade.Īnother capacity-building experience happened when I was a postdoctoral research fellow. In those days, my youthful hubris did not understand about capacity building. “The best I could do was a B−?” The realization sank in that maybe I was not such a good writer.

Although the topic of that essay is now lost to my memory, the grade I received was not: a B−. At last, I produced an essay that seemed the apex of what I was capable of writing. I worked harder, making revision after revision, a concept I had never really put much faith in before.

I was frustrated that my first assignment only netted me a C. My writing could not please this kindhearted woman, no matter how hard I tried.Īlthough Gifted and Talented seventh-grade math posed no problem for me, the same was not true for Mrs.