An open letter to graduate students and other procrastinators: it’s time to write

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Everyone understands the structure of a scientific paper. But when presented with the onerous task of writing a scientific manuscript on your own work, it may seem at times an insurmountable challenge to get started. If you are doing your job properly, you will be writing about something that has never been done before — and in a few cases has never even been thought of before. Your audience needs to understand two things: what is the nature of the question or problem you are attempting to address, and what do you — specifically you — think about it? There are a host of other problems and issues that arise around these two things, but understanding them is key to getting started with writing.

Here we have arrived at the most essential point that should motivate you to read the rest of this letter. If you are in the sciences, at the PhD level, writing is the only thing you do that matters. The most important trait for you to have to have lasting impact on humanity, and indeed to sustain your career, is your ability to have ideas, to gather evidence in support of them, and to publish them. Your job is to have ideas and spread them so that they impact other people’s work. Writing is your job. Nothing else. Therefore, everything else that you do is subservient to the activity of writing. Let this revolution take place in your mind.

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