Treecutter's Guide to Research Paper Writing
published:
by Harshvardhan J. Pandit
academia conference research
When I was about 12 years old, I was at this inspirational event where us kids were put forth the following question: "Imagine a woodcutter gets a commission to cut down a tree by the end of the day and it takes him about an hour to do so. What do you think is the first thing he does?" My immediate response was "He goes and cuts down the tree!" But no, the sly smile of the expected trickster corrected me with "He sharpens his axe for the better part of the day." For many years I have pondered upon the apparent wisdom of that story. My issue with the entirety of it was -- why didn't the woodcutter kept his axe sharp. Why did he have to sharpen it just when the work came in. And no matter how I could think about it, I could understand just how this story is supposed to be considered and integrated into your thinking.
Years later, I've done a PhD and a Postdoctoral Research stint, am now an Assistant Prof. with some papers under my belt, and this story again comes up in my mind. I'm thinking now that maybe the reason the woodcutter had to sharpen the axe was because a) the axe was dulled from the earlier work and the sharpening was to put it in the correct condition; b) there was no time to sharpen it before; c) there was something to the sharpening that had to be done specifically for the job at hand. Along with this, the deeper message to the story was the preparation makes the job easier and that a wise man prepares first to make the job easier. Now as an academic, I tend to see many of my colleagues at all levels - from PhDs to postdocs to established profs - approach research primarily in the sense of writing a paper and spend most of their time thinking of the research as the act of writing that paper These two juxtaposed situations made me think that I may have a decent chance of explaining my own philosophy through the foiled stories from my past.
To me, the paper is the visible product of research. It should neither be the primary output nor the goal. While perhaps for some specific arguments or theories it might make sense for thinking on how to write them - I still argue that this writing is different from the structured and methodological narrative that makes up a research article published at a specific venue. Instead of rushing to the job, I think it is better for the researcher to sharpen their (thinking) axe by considering how they will be conducting the research and working on it, and only thinking of the writing when that axe has been sufficiently sharpened to the point of felling the tree (how else do we make papers?).
I understand that for a lot of people, the act of writing the paper is itself something that helps them structure a narrative and assist in deciding how to conduct the research. For example, I have seen people only identify the state of the art when they write the paper - or sometimes when most of it is written but they want to make sure their references are up to date. I also understand that the whole structure of a typical paper is supposed to help people get the information that they used to shape and direct their research, but I feel that the act of focusing on the writing is limiting the potential of having your own voice and ideas rather than conforming to a dry and methodically boring research writing.
So the way I want to think about this is how the woodcutter thinks about chopping down that tree. He doesn't rush to the tree, he doesn't start chopping the tree and sharpening that axe in between the chops. He instead sits down and starts identifying the tools and techniques that he will need for his job for that day. He starts with identifying how he is going to cut down that tree (where the tree is the research and not the paper) and what kinds of axes he has (techniques) and how he can sharpen it (methodologies). He sharpens and sharpens and prepares and prepares. And only when he is confident that the axe is sharp enough and he is ready does he go down and chop the tree. What all of this means in the context of research is - don't think about the writing but think of the tools and techniques that you need for the research and how you can get the outputs. It is through this understanding of the process that you become aware of how that research was carried out. This is the most difficult lesson to incorporate from a PhD, and the one that most people seem to miss.
To learn is not to communicate. To learn is to understand, to absorb and reshape into new thoughts that are you own, to use them and know the whys and wheres and the whats and the whens, and only when you know how you think can you communicate. Otherwise its nothing better than the stochasticisms of academic parrotism.
To implement this, I use a lot of whiteboarding to think about the work, to identify the specific reasons and motivations for why something must be the way it is. Sometimes I find that I have a specific way of doing things in mind and instead of just getting down and finishing the work - I try to think how I can be sure this is the best way. What other ways are there. How do I get the outputs. What do I need to show these are the best outputs given the situation. And then I do the work. And then I think how to communicate this work to a specific person or audience - and that's when I sit down and write the skeleton of a paper which I then expand into coherent sentences.