Today Morgan discusses really really boring scientific talk titles. Giving a great science talk begins with having a great title, that captivates the audience and motivates them to come to your talk. Don’t be afraid of giving your talk an interesting title! You will stand out, because everyone else will continue to use boring dry talk titles. Standing out is good. It gets you noticed. Morgan shares her favorite title for a talk, “Modeling biology with equations is like strapping a …. ” (you’ll have to watch the video to find out).

The other day, after reading a book on copyrighting by Joe Sugarman, I decided to use one technique that he suggests for coming up with a title for an upcoming talk.

The technique is simple: brainstorm. Don’t just write one title. Write 25 or more. Then pick the best one.

So I started brainstorming. I wrote some titles. I wrote some more. I started feeling silly, but I forced myself to write some more.

Towards the end, I got a little loopy. You can see the whole list below.

I then went back and rated them all, 1 (best), 2 (ok) or 3 (bad). I sorted them all in a spreadsheet, and removed the 2’s and 3’s.

I had about 5 left.

One kept beckoning to me. I just could not bring myself to delete it, or pick one of the others above it.

Guess which one?

“Modeling biology with equations is like strapping a V8-engine to a horse drawn buggy”

If I had written this title in my standard way, the most likely outcome would have been:
“Multi scale systems biology modeling with computer agents”

Which one sounds more interesting? I find the former far more compelling, due to the strong visual.

And, it conveys an important subtext that the second, more “safe” title doesn’t – that our tools aren’t necessarily right for the job.

Who knows how the folks at the receiving institution will like it, but it gave people around here a good laugh. They liked the title. I wrote the abstract in a more serious tone – but it did address the point made by the title.

This is an example of “Marketing Your Science” in action. A boring title is less likely to catch someone’s attention. If it doesn’t catch their attention, then they’re unlikely to come to the talk. If they don’t come to the talk, then what is the point of giving it?

Here is the list of possibilities I brainstormed (I’d like to see your vote in the comments for which one you prefer):

Agents are everything

Agents and fractals

Agents and fractals: modeling self similar protein behavior

Modeling self similar protein behavior

Multi scale systems biology modeling with computer agents

Protein behavior as a fractal mirror to nature

How complexity arises from simplicity in biology

Cells are simple, but our models that are complex

Proteins are simple, but our models are complex

Of birds and proteins: how modeling reveals fractal self-similarity

Birds are made of proteins and birds are like proteins

The Birds, the bees, and the proteins: how nature mirrors itself at multiple scales

Taking cues from the birds and the bees to construct realistic cellular models

Can cancer be solved by specialists? Or does it require a generalist.

It’s not the size of your CPU, it’s how you use it

It’s not the size of your equation, it’s how you use it

From equations to agents – boiling the complex down to the simple

Models as tools – it’s all how you use them

Modeling biology with equations is like strapping a V8-engine to a horse drawn buggy
“You have lots of power but won’t get very far”.

Representations of proteins: equations or agents?

From the simple arises the complex: can we mirror this in a computer?

Biological complexity arises from simplicity – can we model it the other way around?

Modeling how biological complexity arises from simple rules

The complexity we see in biology derives from many simple interactions

Forward modeling or reverse modeling: from the top down or from the bottom up?

On the top or on the bottom? Modeling approaches reveal how you like it.

ps – should science really be so boring all the time?  Most talk titles I see convey that sense.  But given that we need to get more people interested in science, not less, how about we make it a little bit interesting from time to time?

pss – I invited well known antibiotic resistance researcher Bruce Levin (from Emory) to give an upcoming seminar in my department.  He obviously “gets” this concept.  His talk title?

“Sex and drugs: the population and evolutionary dynamics of recombination and antibiotic treatment in bacteria”

The global warming debate stirs up passions from both supporters and deniers.

One thing that is clearly lost in most of the “popular” debate is the underlying science.

There was an article that studied this: “Balance as bias: global warming and the US Presige Press“.

They make an interesting case about why the popular press coverage of the issue, under the guise of “balanced reporting,” actually skews away from the science.

Here’s a simple thought experiment to illustrate how “balanced” reporting is biased

Say we have the “Purples” and the “Yellows” – two groups of people who have a strongly held belief in their favorite color.

There are 95 Purples and 5 Yellows.

We also have two other groups:  ”Reporters” and “Undecideds”.

Undecideds listen to Reporters.  Reporters have the job of “balanced” reporting of the Purple vs Yellow debate.

So, every time the debate crops up, they report “Purple said XXX” and then balance it with “Yellow responds YYYY.”

Let’s do the math, and compare that to what “Undecideds” will end up reading.

They will read 50% of the reporting on Purple’s side, and 50% on Yellow’s side (if it is truly “balanced”).

So, if there are 100 news reports, there will be a total of 200 statements.

100 for Purple, and 100 for Yellow.

Already it sounds to Neutrals like Yellow is “just as valid” as purple, because we’ve got “fair and balanced” reporting (despite that Purples are actually in the vast majority).

But it gets worse. Because the Yellow population is so small, the press ends up asking the same people over and over again (resampling from a limited pool).  Those five Yellow folks get a lot of practice, and refine their message over time.  Plus, they have extra incentive to promote Yellow, because they get $$$ from donors for it.  So they get really, really good at promoting Yellowness.

However, the Purple folks only get asked once in a while for quotes.  They don’t get much practice. And they don’t get any $$$ for being purple, so they have no real need to refine their message.  Plus they’re the kind of folk who don’t really like “marketing” themselves anyway.  They think “marketing” is a strategy only for, well, marketers.

So, then, you have the “balanced” reporting that gives the undecideds the impression of a 50/50 split, on top of a more refined message from the yellows.

Who’s going to win that debate?

I don’t care what topic you pick (global warming or colors of the rainbow), the minority group with the refined message wins the round.

That’s why Science Marketing is so absolutely vital!

A while ago I wrote about one of my own major “science marketing blunders” (and I have more stories to come).

But this global warming thing is a similar blunder writ large.

On that point, I just saw a tweet from Michael O’Loughlin that is relevant: “So tired of science not being vetted through academia, rather it is being spun by media all the time.”

There are two fallacies in this thinking:

1. That academia is particularly good at “vetting” (I say this having just received yet another crackpot paper review last night from a reviewer who must have been asleep – they missed the point by a mile – while the other reviewer clearly “got it”)

2. That this is the fault of “the media”.

NO.

It is our own fault as scientists, because we, collectively, are horrible at marketing our work to the general public.

I’m not trying to start a war here about whether global warming is real or not – or whether we should do something about it or not.

I’m simply saying that, if the majority of the scientific evidence on the topic says one thing, yet the majority of the populace believes the opposite thing, then we, as scientists, have done a horrible job of getting our message out.  We have failed at marketing.

Why do we do such a horrible job at getting the message out?

There are multiple reasons:

• Because we’re boring. Seriously boring.  I see talk and paper titles all the time that are fluffed up with haughty buzzwords.  It may make the speaker/author look smart, but what it doesn’t do is get a broad audience interested.
• And since we’re boring, our message gets drowned out by the sea of noise out there in the world – Pop stars, Olympics, Car Ads, Beer Ads, Internet Marketers, iPods, iPads, American Idol, Lost… you name it.  It all competes for attention, every day and all the time.  Boring is going to loose that competition, every time.
• Worse still, scientists haven’t caught up with modern internet communications.  Visit a typical scientist’s lab website.  My own is a case in point. (I’ll refer to my own site so as not to offend anyone else.  I’m sure this only applies to my site, and that yours is exciting and interesting).  It is full of tedious facts going on and on about how great we are.  It doesn’t get updated often.  It is not particularly interactive.  We don’t promote ourselves on Twitter or Facebook.  The list goes on. I might want to change it, excepting the following point:
• There is no direct “reward” for marketing or promoting our science to the outside world. This is a humdinger. As a practicing scientist, the best way I can be rewarded (if I care about that kind of thing) is to keep my head down, work hard, publish papers, and apply for grants (then apply for more grants).  Maybe I should mentor a few students and teach a few classes here and there.  That’s it.  If I decide to take it upon myself to do something outside of that – this blog for instance – there is no reward, and quite often, a negative reward.  It takes time away from the grant writing I should be doing.
• We don’t understand that different media require different messages.  Scientific papers may require more rigorous terminology – but communication with the general public requires inspiring, interesting, and exciting words.  They are two different beasts, and almost no scientists I know are trained in the art of communicating with the public (though some figure it out).
• How many times have I heard some scientist on NPR saying “the evidence is inconclusive” or somesuch.  Well, I’ve got news: the evidence for everything, always, is inconclusive! But ordinary people who aren’t scientists don’t understand that kind of waffling.  They get up, go to work, and get a paycheck.  If they don’t go to work, they get fired, and there’s no paycheck.  None of that stuff is “waffling” – it is reality.  There’s no “63.2%” probability there.  So it is hard for someone living in that kind of reality to understand people who sit there and waffle about “we don’t really know how much the temperature will rise”.  Come on, folks!  Some of you are pretending as if human belief has nothing to do with it, and that science is all just about “facts.”  By pretending this, you damage your scientific cause – whatever that may be.

Science is not just about “facts”.  If it were, then explain this phenomenon to me: science goes in fads and fashions.  Once it was a “fact” that stomach acid caused ulcers – until a new “fact” came along that H. pylori causes ulcers.  Those two “facts” contradict one another.

That’s because they are not facts, they are beliefs, supported by some body of evidence.  And those beliefs often change as scientific fads come and go, and as new evidence accumulates.

I’m not saying that global warming is a fad.

What I am saying is that I know many people on the “yes global warming is happening” side of the debate, who act as if the debate is about “facts”.  When you get into a debate and pretend it is about facts when it is actually about belief, you’re going to loose, every time.

That’s because you’re debating from a weak platform.  You’re not admitting to yourself that you actually believe something, and so you’re not allowing yourself to argue the point effectively.

Hence, you go up against someone who does unabashedly believe in their side of the argument, and they’re going to quite frequently come out on top – regardless of “facts”.

If scientists would learn “marketing” this wouldn’t be such a ridiculous debate

Here’s an interesting tidbit: good marketers are just as scientific as any scientist, perhaps more.

They test everything.  Every headline, every word, every ad gets tested – because it is the difference between money and no money in the pocket.

Hence, I find it rather ironic that no scientist I know of is out there testing the efficacy of their own scientific communications.  There is no “split testing” for the efficacy journal article headlines or lab websites.  Hence, most of them are not effective.

Simply put, marketing is a science: the science of swaying belief.

Hence, it is a second irony that the marketers of the anti-global-warming debate are using the science of belief so much more effectively than the scientists with the pro-global-warming point of view.

And that, dear reader, is why I need to get back to writing my book about “Marketing Your Science”. (3 chapters done, a few more partly done – it won’t be that long, if I can just find the time to work on it).

I know a lot of artists and scientists, and the story is the same for both: be “proud” or be “paid”.

This came up when I was talking to a friend who has a band that plays some music I happen to like, Graveyard Fields.

I recently ran across Mark Joyner’s “Online Music Promotion Course”, and I recommended it to my friend the musician.

Mark Joyner is an “internet mogul” who pioneered many aspects of early online marketing, and now runs a series of courses on managing time, money, and energy. I’ve gotten a lot out of Mark Joyner’s various efforts. For one, I’ve learned how to better promote my own scientific work.

I thought that my musician friend needed some marketing help, so I told him about the course.

A few days later, I asked him, “did you sign up?”

His response distilled down was “it was too much marketing for me.”

I was a bit flabbergasted – but not surprised.

I see this all the time. I used to hold this attitude. In fact, I used to resent some of the well-known scientists who are good at “marketing” themselves (almost all well known scientists are good at marketing themselves, unless they were the 1-2% that got really lucky by being “discovered”).

A month ago, I attended a book writing session at the Science Online conference near Raleigh/Durham NC. I saw the same dynamic play out.

There were three published authors running the session. Guess which one of those was the most successful (in terms of buzz, interest, interviews, and perhaps, money made)? It was the author who had been doing her own marketing for more than a year before the book was published, through Twitter, Facebook, and blogs.

After the authors spoke, questions were asked. There were questions on how to get “discovered”. It seemed clear that at least part of the audience were only interested in practicing “their art” – not in doing their own promotion.

But the odds of being “discovered” without sufficient self-promotion are about the same as the odds of winning a lottery.

Hey, I didn’t make the rules. Sometimes I am not proud to have to “market” my work. But the evidence is all around: if you don’t promote your artistic (or scientific) work, you are very unlikely to get any gravy from it.

I’m not exactly sure why the world has changed to the point where this is so necessary, but I have an idea.

I believe that it is the constant cacophany of other “marketing” messages that are out there, screaming for your attention.

I know plenty of people who hate this. I know one person who changed cell phone providers simply because of their marketing.

But recently I had an interaction that was revelatory to me.

I joined an online copywriting course, focused on marketing copy.

I sent a sample of one of my bits of work to the instructor. He sent it back completely rewritten, and I thought it sounded like a late night infomercial. When I told him that was my response, he wrote back saying: “the reason it sounds that way is because that works – those guys spend millions of dollars on those infomercials, so they tune and tweak them until they pay off”

It is so bizarre to me, sometimes, to write ad copy. But I’ve done some testing myself – and the “late night infomercial” approach is statistically superior to bland and understated in terms of response.

Science is a creative product – just like books and CDs. While one can’t go about writing “late night infomercial” style headlines for manuscripts or grant proposals (I’m sure that would backfire), it is essential to pay attention to how the work is being “marketed”. (aside: most science work is not marketed at all – that’s why most articles get buried in the trashbin of history so rapidly).

Here’s another way I can verify this. My mother was a successful watercolor artist. What do I mean by “successful?” I mean that she paid the bills by selling her art – without ever holding a “side job”.

How did she do that? A majority of her revenue came from marketing notecards and prints with her art on it. Only a fraction of the revenue came from selling the paintings themselves. She figured out early on that she had to “market” her work. She didn’t necessarily love that aspect of the work. But she did get to avoid working as a clerk at Wal Mart.

While I don’t have hard statistical evidence on this, I think the anecdotal evidence is so strong as to be almost irrefutable – if you don’t learn how to market your own creative works effectively, then getting paid reasonable money to do that work is unlikely.

The bottom line for my friend (and many others I know who hate to hear mention of “marketing”): “you can be too proud to market your work, or you can can get paid for your work – but not both”.

Speaking of that, do you want a preview of my upcoming book, code named “Marketing Your Science”? People who sign up for my newsletter list right now get a free copy of Chapter 1 – Why Marketing Your Science Is Important.

It’s that little box in the upper left hand corner that is beckoning to you.

Are you struggling with formulating a great specific aims page?

The specific aims are one of your keys to success.  If a reviewer encounters your aims, and gets confused or lost, then it is likely game over for your grant.  Do not collect $200, do not pass go.

In both my advising and consulting work with my younger colleagues, I focus first and foremost on the specific aims.  I won’t look at the rest of a proposal until the aims are water tight, rock solid, and exciting as well.

It is amazing how much complexity can go into formulating just this single page.  Perhaps that’s why so many people don’t do it very well.

I often see half-cocked aims pages.  But a half-cocked aims page is the start to a half-cocked proposal.  Why bother, if you aren’t going to do it right?

Just say “no” to half cocked aims

I was recently helping a consulting client with an aims page, and there was an aim which was half-cocked.

By that I mean that it was a good thing to do, but the plan for doing it wasn’t well thought out.

I suggested to the client to either firm up the plan, or get rid of the aim.

His response was, “But then I’ll only have 3 aims”.

“So what?” I said.

In my ensuing explanation, I firmed up something that was vague before.

Your aims page is a main “public face” of your proposal.

Think about your first date with someone.  Don’t you usually make sure that you look nice, before you walk out the door?  Your aims should be that same way.  They should put your best foot forward.

Sure, you may have flaws (all of us do), like a little too much flab around the waist (or whatever), but in all likelihood, you’re going to wear clothes that minimize that flaw on the first date.

Your aims should be like the first date.

A half-cocked aim is like letting the flawed parts shine out right away, saying “look at me”.  Some reviewers might overlook that.  Others will not.  All it takes is one reviewer who doesn’t like your proposal to sink its chances.

Your goal is to show strength, confidence, and logical thinking about your research, with each aim well thought out and accomplishing a critical mission within the context of your proposal.

If you put an aim on your aims page, that says, “this is one of the central things that I will focus my time and attention on during this research.”

So, if you list something, then you proceed to have a not so great plan for how you will do that “critical thing”, reviewers will wonder – has this person really thought out this work?  You don’t want reviewers holding any doubts, whatsoever.  When paylines are 1 in 8 or 1 in 10 proposals funded – one doubt can burn your funding chances to the ground.

The bottom line is that for each aim in the proposal, have a well thought out plan.  If you are struggling with figuring that plan out, then it shouldn’t be an aim!  You may still propose to do that work as a part of another aim (within the text of the proposal) – but something that is not solidly formulated should never go on the aims page.

Free specific aims template and example

I provide a free specific aims template, and a specific aims example page to my email list subscribers.  You can subscribe using the “subscribe” box on the blog here, or going to this page.

Previously, I wrote about an upcoming meeting with the chancellor of UNC.

It was audacious of me to just call up and make an appointment with the head of a large, prestigious institution like mine.

But I like to live life on the edge.

My goal was to discuss entrepreneurialism within the university – and how the university bureaucracy squashes entrepreneurial spirt.

The layers of bureaucracy are thick here, layered like a truffle embedded inside a wedding cake….

The chancellor was surprisingly receptive to my visit.  He’s obviously a smart guy, and a scientist.  He wants to do right by the University and its faculty.

He clearly understood the problems of bureaucracy at UNC.  He said it is his number one mission to reduce it.

But every time he tamps down the bureaucracy in one division, it lasts for a little while until he turns his attention to something else.  Then it grows right back, like weeds in a place with plenty of water and sunlight.

Perhaps that is an apt analogy.  Cutting back the weeds never solves the problem.  They just grow back.

The only ways to kill weeds are to cut off their water or sunlight – or to poison them.  Since “poisoning” is not going to be an acceptable solution when it comes to bureaucracy, we have to implement one of the other solutions.

The sunlight and water of bureaucracy are money and rules.

Rules serve a purpose – at least in someone’s mind, at the time they are conceived.

Once they have served for a while, they grow stale, old, and smelly.  Bureaucracy thrives on them – while everyone else chokes.

And money helps support the beast.  One might try to choke off the money, but I guess that the people at the end of the food chain – the scientists – would starve before the bureaucracy does.

Every grant that a researcher brings in comes with “facilities and administration” (F&A) money.  That money is supposed to pay for things that support the research environment.

But it is all sucked up into the voracious beast before it gets to the place where it benefits the researcher.  Various people have pointed out to me various “worthwhile” things that it is used for.

Is 5 levels of bureaucracy to approve a hire, “worthwhile?”

It doesn’t matter whether it is “worthwhile,” even in the rare instance that it is.  It is not benefiting the research.  It is not benefiting the science that the grants are supposed to be supporting.

I work in a 30 year old building that is crawling with cockroaches.  I’m not sure who that benefits, except for the cockroaches.

The way to starve the beast is to bypass it.  The F&A money should go directly to the researcher’s most immediate unit (e.g. department).

The department then could apply it to do things like get the space that we need.

I can hear many people in humanities say, “but wait, that would starve our side of campus.”

I am very much in favor of supporting the humanities and many other non-science departments.  I have a personal fondness for philosophy.

But I am not in favor of supporting those departments with F&A money from grants that are given to me to do specific research.  That is misdirection at best.  The state and tuition should be supporting the teaching mission of the University.

—-

I was thinking about all the hiring problems we seem to have.  It can take (many) months to get a hire completed, because it has to go through so many levels.

Why is that?

My department seems to have an HR person (a “facilitator”) just to navigate the bureaucracy at higher levels of the system.

Instead, why not train her in the rules, and just let her do the work directly?  Then we wouldn’t need 5 levels above her (or however many it is).  It would be faster, cheaper, and would starve the beast.

Don’t get me wrong.  I think that many of the people that work within the beast are very well meaning and trying to do their jobs.  But when one is trying to do their job in a dysfunctional organization, the job is, unfortunately, promoting more dysfunction.

Out of date rules need to be removed.  But there would be massive resistance to that.

Money needs to flow around the bureaucracy, not into it.  There would be massive resistance to that too, but perhaps not quite as much.

Ideally, both would happen.  That would really take care of the problem, once and for all.

I hope the Chancellor is listening

——

Note: I do plan to get back to topics of science careers and grant writing in the next installment.

You can also join my newsletter list if you want to hear more about the career stuff right away.

Science Online 2010 is a confluence of writers, scientists, bloggers, and folks figuring out how the internet, science and writing are coming together.

This session is an exploration of how to be a scientific author in today’s online world.

One of the main messages of the session is what I’ve been doing with this blog. The idea is that long before the book comes out, to build a community of people who are interested in the subject matter.

I’ve been doing that here, long before my book is ready. To me it seemed like “gut instinct” as part of the things I do now that I’ve learned a lot about marketing.

But it is clear that this is not a natural approach for many people.  At the conference today, Thomas Levenson discussed how he had failed to do this for previous books, and they hadn’t been as successful as he’d hoped.  He pointed to the example of Rebecca Skloot (who was also there at the session) who had been building an audience for years through blogging and twitter before the release of her upcoming book “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks”.

Blogs (and social media) are all about having a discussion.  As Rebecca pointed out, you can’t just show up and say “hey, I’m here, buy my book!”  Would you do that at a dinner party?  Nope.  You have to get people interested first.

From the perspective of marketing (what I’m writing about in my own book), this is about a value exchange.  You have to give people something to get something from them.  So, if you want people to follow you and pay attention to you, you have to give them value.  Value is the key medium of exchange, but few of us are taught about the importance of this.

I think that comes from a perspective where most people work in paid jobs of some kind where there is no clear concept of the “value exchange”.  Often when working for pay, that equation gets lost.  It just becomes a “job” that one “has to do” rather than “hey, I’m giving my time in exchange for the salary I’m getting.”

But in business, this equation comes clear quickly!  If you don’t pay attention to this in business, that business won’t be around for long!  The business must offer value to its customers in order to get their money.

So, my take on this session is to give out great value, and build an audience based on that value – then publish your book.  That audience will probably go buy it because you’ve already given them lots of value, and they will probably want more of it.

One of the reasons I started this blog was to give pointers to young scientists who are trying to learn how to effectively convey their science to their audience.  I see many challenges that graduate students and post-docs face in this arena.  In fact, I believe that the inability to effectively convey one’s science is the biggest road block most of my trainees have faced. While that may not be a valid statistical sampling, I suspect that it represents a wider and deeper indication about the lack of preparation that many folks have to face the real-world needs to convince an “audience” that one’s scientific work is worthwhile.

I want to cover just one example of this today.

I am working on a book chapter project with a person in my lab, describing a new algorithm we developed. (I am intentionally vague here so as to not put that person on the spot).  One of the main components of this book chapter is going through an example of the program running on a data set, then discussing its output.  My co-author chose as the sole example of program operation one that had many pathological features.  He did this in order to illustrate where and how the program might fail.

There are several problems with this.  One, it is likely that this book chapter will be the first time that a reader will have heard about our algorithm.  If we tell them all the ways that it can fail as the first example of its operation, they’re going to go away thinking that it is junk.  Have you ever gone to buy a car and had the car salesman point out all the ways the car could fail or break down?  Never – because you would not ever buy a car from that person, and that person would very soon be out of a job.  While one would hope that scientists are a bit more circumspect than car salesmen, the underlying psychological principles are the same.

A second issue is that this is the only example provided in this chapter draft, so the only result the reader will see is this one that has a number of issues where the program failed.  However, the chapter is aimed at potential users of the algorithm.  Telling them how it is likely to fail doesn’t convey how they should maximize the use of the program on their own data.  Nor does it encourage them to do so.  It may be ok to include this as a second example, after a first one is shown that works well.  By showing the differences between proper operation and poor operation, we might expect the reader to learn more about the strengths and weaknesses.

As scientists, one of the biggest hurdles all of us face is convincing others that our work is worthwhile.  This problem is particularly acute for those of us who develop software as part of our science.  It is all to common to develop a piece of software, then have it just sit there, mostly unused.  That is a big waste of time and money.  I used to think if I developed great software, the world would come knock down the door looking for it.  That was naive. There are thousands of pieces of software out there, and many of them work poorly.  A potential user (e.g. biologist) could waste a tremendous amount of time trying them and attempting to get them to work, so most people don’t.  The biggest barrier we face as developers is getting people to even consider or try our software in the first place. This is followed by a second big barrier, which is convincing people to keep using the software, especially if it doesn’t work perfectly the first time out of the gate (what software ever works perfectly?).  To address these hurdles, it is our job as authors to convey emotions such as enthusiasm and excitement to the reader.  Only if we can get the reader sufficiently emotional about the software (in a good way) will they be likely to ever give it a shot, and persist through any problems encountered.

So if the first document that people see about our software shows more about how it can fail than how it can succeed, most people will never bother trying it.  Describing things that way does not engender positive emotion or enthusiasm, so they’ll just move onto the next thing.

In the case of this book chapter draft, the use of the negative example was exacerbated by the way it was described.  My co-author chose to leave the fact that the example had several pathologies as a “surprise”, meaning that it wasn’t until after the output of that example was presented, that the pathologies were discussed.  When I first read this part of the draft, I expected that I would see a good working example.  As I got into the text describing it, the deficiencies were then described matter-of-factly, as if they were just par for the course (read: normal behavior).  If the “normal behavior” is deficient operation, the reader’s enthusiasm is substantially quelled.  I probably wouldn’t try software that had been described like this.  I would move on.

This illustrates that how one sets up readers’ expectations are important. If my co-author had indicated from the outset that an example was intentionally chosen to illustrate some pathologies, and clearly indicated that this was not the usual, expected behavior, I might not have been so surprised (on the downside) when I encountered the actual output.

This is not by any means the first time I’ve encountered this type of problem in a student’s writing.  And it is not associated only with writing about software.  The problem can plague writing about any kind of science that one might do.  I believe it stems from prior training in undergraduate or graduate laboratory classes, where a student is asked told to do experiments then write them up to turn in for grading.  In my experience, the number one focus of such assignments is making sure that the student has accurately performed and represented his/her research. If the student overstates or misstates any results, he/she gets harshly penalized.

It is well and good to definitively teach students not to overstate or misstate their results, because to do so can be career destroying.  But in focusing on the negative, I believe many instructors overlook the nearly equal importance of teaching students to emphasize the positive in their work. That’s pretty hard to teach when the students are just doing the same old experiment that has been done by thousands of other students and replicates something originally discovered by someone now long-dead. There’s no room in such a context to teach the importance and power of conveying excitement and enthusiasm about positive results (while retaining a proper balance with realism).  Because of that, when students come to my lab, almost none of them seem to understand this crucial balancing act, and in fact it is often a long, slow road to teach them.  In my own career, I struggled with this point all through my graduate work, post-doc work, and even through my first years as an assistant professor.

In the case of our book chapter, my co-author could have presented a positive (but realistic) example, then either presented a second, more pathological example, or just discussed in the text what pathologies might occur in certain circumstances.  This approach would have the likely effect of more positively conveying the work, while realistically acknowledging its limitations.

So that concludes my first pointer, and it is a very important one: nobody is going to tout your work for you, you have to do it yourself, and it is a critical part of any type of communication you produce as a scientist.