Acquiring Skills of Writing

During my ongoing literature review I often discover interesting facts about things I’ve never thought about. Sometimes I can connect these facts with my own observations: The result is mostly a completely new idea why things are as they are. Maybe these ideas are new to you, too. Therefore I’ll share my new science based knowledge with you!

This week: This time, I think about my personal progress in practicing paper writing and discuss my latest submissions. Practicing scientific writing is like acquiring a new skill, it requires a lot of practice to really master it.

Last year, I submitted one of my key papers describing the underlying theory of my PhD thesis to a journal. Half a year of anxiety and impatience later, I received the decision from the journal: they rejected my paper. Unfortunately, the three reviewers were not as thorough as I expected after such a long waiting period. Only one of them provided an in-depth review that mainly focussed on a few things that were not even close to the central part of the paper. This, however, is not an uncommon thing, but seems to be a thing that happens on a frequent basis …

Now, about three months after the rejection of my paper, I submitted it again to a very promising and interesting conference last Thursday. I have to admit that the paper has definitely improved over the course of the last three months and follows a much cleaner structure by now. However, it did not improve due to the reviews from the initial journal submission (thanks again reviewers …), but from my personal skill training in writing papers. Over the course of the last 9 months, I learned a few more lessons that helped me improving my key paper.

In the end, learning to write (good) papers is like acquiring a new skill. It requires a lot of deliberate practice to really get a feeling for the writing process and to learn to keep sentences as simple as possible. Hopefully, I fulfilled all of these requirements in this paper submission as I really like to see my theory getting published. It would not only provide me with positive feedback about my research, but also allow me to finally start focussing on the thesis writing process. So keep your fingers crossed!

In addition to the great overhaul of my key paper, I also managed to write two additional papers and submit them to the same conference. All of the them focus on my main research goal: demonstrating how knowledge can be learned and trained using game mechanics. One paper presents the underlying concept, the next one focusses on the predictability of my theory, and the last one describes an actual application of my theory to design effective learning environments.

Now, the new waiting period begins. Hopefully, my key paper gets accepted and if at least one of the additional papers gets accepted, too, I will be a super happy scientist. It would prove that my research is valuable and accepted by the community.

In the meantime, I will continue to practice my writing skills as there is still one paper that needs some minor changes, a new experiment is starting next week, and the next big deadline is slowly appearing at the horizon. Let’s get back to work …