Sometimes students in my classes are surprised
that I care about the quality of their writing.
But I'm always surprised that anyone could imagine that there could be
any area of scholarship or any area of dealing with the world where we
wouldn't care about how we write and how we speak to each other.
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I study ants and because I'm interested in how an organization can work without any
central control.
So in an ant colony there's nobody in charge, nobody tells anybody what to do.
The ants can only perceive what's right around them.
And yet somehow the colony can function and
reproduce, and adjust its behavior to changing conditions.
And I'm fascinated by how very limited individuals
working in the aggregate can do such complicated things.
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I'm always surprised by the idea that a scientist doesn't need to know how
to write, because a scientist lays out an argument.
Of course we use numbers and measurements, but
we use them in the service of making an argument about ideas.
About asking questions and answering them.
So a scientist needs to be able to talk and to write just as anybody does.
There is nothing special about science that
lifts us out of the need to communicate with each other.
So writing in science is important in exactly the same way it's important in any
other area of scholarship.
Or in any other way that people want to talk to each other.
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Thinking about my work and talking about my work and
writing about my work are all different stages of the same process.
One of my favorite things about studying the behavior of ants is those moments when
I'm quiet and watching, and see things that I never thought of.
But I'm always trying to put together what I see and
to make patterns in my mind out of the patterns of their behavior.
So, in writing I have time to think and
to lay out an argument and to put together my thoughts.
So, writing really helps me to think.
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The first step in writing is by far the hardest,
because that's when I have to figure out what I really want to say.
And in the beginning, all I want to do is to get it down on paper somehow.
And not worry very much about how I'm saying it, but
just try to be clear about what it is exactly that I want to say.
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Everything I write, I write over and over.
So I learned a lot about writing from my dissertation adviser who
covered every piece of paper I ever gave him in red marks.
And paid enormous amount of attention to the details of grammar, to reference,
to the rhythm of a sentence, and I learned a tremendous amount from him.
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For students, for people starting out, when you have a lot of ideas
thrown at you, and it's hard to see how they all fit in.
Then the words, the names, the jargon become a way
of trying to learn to talk in this new world.
And when someone really understands what they mean to say,
they don't need jargon anymore.
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When I write, I have something I wanna say.
And I try to say it as clearly as I can, and
I hope that the reader will understand it.
But I don't know how the reader will take it.
Writing is always a peculiar one-way conversation.
I say something and I don't have any way of checking how it will be heard.
So, if I write about ants, and someone reads it and they say,
wow I really like that or that was really interesting.
I don't really have any way of knowing what it was that that reader
saw in what I wrote.
So it's an offering.
I, I put it out there, but I don't know how people will take it.
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Until I wrote my first book,
all of my writing related to my work was articles for journals,
and a journal article in science has a particular style.
There are certain parts you can only say certain things in certain parts.
And in writing a journal article I have to squeeze what I want to say into this form.
And when I wrote my first book I imagined myself writing it for other academics.
And it was a wonderful surprise to realize that anybody could understand it.
So I didn't really set out to write a book for everyone.
I set out to write as clearly as possible what I wanted to say to
my peers about the work I was doing about ants.
And it was a delight to realize that I could simply speak in my own voice and
I would be able to talk to a much wider range of people than I had imagined.
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