The Female Science Professor had a nice post about working with someone who was afraid to write a paper:
Out of desperation, I told the graphophobe to meet me at a particular cafe at a particular time, with the latest draft of the manuscript and whatever other notes or references he needed. We met, I copied the manuscript to my laptop, scrolled to the first extremely incomplete section of the text and said "Tell me what you think should go in this section." He talked and I typed.
We worked our way through the manuscript that way, discussing each section. What should go in it? What was the best logic? What kind of evidence was needed to support an interpretation? What is the best interpretation? Are there other possibilities? What references should be cited? What figures? Maybe this section should actually go over there, and maybe that part on page 17 should be moved down, and what do you think about this?
We worked for nearly 3 hours like that without stopping. I had thought we might get a couple of pages done, but we finished the paper, or at least, another (complete!) draft of it. Now it can be circulated among other co-authors.
This is a nice reminder that getting started is one of the hardest parts of writing. It's something I struggle with a bit myself. It's easy to become paralyzed by trying to think of how to phrase things, and how to organize your thoughts. Sometimes, you just have to sit down and bang out some text, even if it sucks, because that gives you a starting point for revisions.
That can be a daunting prospect, though, and I wonder if it isn't the root cause of some of the catastrophic failures I've seen from students who are plenty smart enough to do the labs, but just never manage to get anything handed in. Pretty much all of the failing grades I've given out (not that many) have been due to failures to hand in lab reports.
(And then, of course, there's the opposite problem: the stream-of-consciousness lab report, where things are written down in whatever order they occurred to the student. The root cause of those is "starting to write the lab eight hours before it's due," and there's not a whole lot to be done about that.)
Lab reports and the grading thereof continue to be the bane of my existence, which means that I'm in for an extra special treat this coming term. I'm teaching both the intro mechanics course, with lab, and also half of the junior/senior level lab course, in which students write multiple formal reports about advanced lab experiments. I'm looking at grading somewhere between 30 and 48 lab reports over the next ten weeks (depending on how I decide to handle the intro labs. Whee!
The topic of labs and lab writing came up a little while ago on a mailing list for advanced lab instructors, which did produce something helpful. This lab web page from Carnegie Mellon includes, about halfway down, an "Outline for organizing a scientific article," which is a three-page fill-in-the-blank document for getting down the essential elements of a lab report.
I think this is a great idea, and plan to use a version of it with the intro class, and maybe even with the lab class. I hope it will provide a way to help clarify and structure the thoughts of the students who need either a way to kick-start the writing process, or just a helping hand to organize their thoughts. And it ought to be short enough to be reviewed and returned quickly, or at least more quickly than requiring full drafts of the reports (which is the best way to fix problems, but presents a crushing burden for faculty.
And, you know, the basic structure would work for a research article as well. Though it would probably be a little insulting to hand this to a graduate student or post-doc. But then, at that level, you can use FSP's Coffee Shop Method.
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One way to get going with a paper is to not start with the paper, but with the powerpoint/OpenOffice/whatever presentation of the paper. When you think about how you'll present the material in front of people, what graphs and illustrations you need and what your main point will be running through it, you effectively create a pretty good outline for the paper itself.
Start writing.
Write down the basics. Do a brain dump.
"Don't worry that it's not good enough for anyone else to hear..."
Just get something on paper and don't worry about it.
Then revise.
I highly recommend Richard Lanham's Revising Prose as a concise and insightful guide to cleaning up writing.
It is almost always easier to repair something that exists than to build it from scratch so the faster one produces the first draft no matter how horrid one feels it is, the faster one gets to the easier part of revising, repairing, tweaking, and massaging.
A good friend of mine recommended Lanham's book when I was a webmaster/blogger at a role-playing game company (she was a manuscript editor) and it has fundamentally changed the way I look at text. You can tell it's a good book on writing because it's short.
In some ways the book isn't suitable for scientists because the official professional writing style is egoless, passive, polysyllabic, and fraught with obscure technical jargon. Granted, science writing is not nearly as bad as po-mo literary criticism (c.f. the Sokal affair), but I can see journal editors grousing about active first-person accounts of experiments. Still, even with such stylistic constraints on one's prose, Lanham gives plenty of techniques to breathe life and clarity into the material.
So pound out the manuscript. Write like a caveman if need be (LASER BURNS! HULK SMASH!) but get something on paper. Then get a good night's sleep, and haul out the red pen in the morning.
As someone currently enrolled in the Carnegie Mellon Lab Course to which you link, I'd like to testify that the Outline for Organizing a Scientific Article is the most useful lab-writing tool I've ever seen. I can't even begin to imagine how much more difficult this course would be without it.
Our professors actually do something like what FSP did for her Graphophobe. After each experiment we have to have a discussion with our professor detailing our conclusions and the results supporting them. Also a super useful thing to do!
This is going to make me sound groutchy and old, but shouldn't they have learned this in freshman English, and by freshman English? By freshman English, I mean back when they were 14 and in 9th grade. It's a slightly modified version of a standard analytical essay.
Even my fairly mediocre high school (during the Bush I era)in a state know much more for it's basketball than education managed to cover that. Plus, they even re-enforceed it across the curiculum.
I wish my PI understood this. That Carnegie Mellon link, though? Awesome!