How to Write a Good Story?? 10 useful Tips from an Editor of A well-known international Journal in conservation

I was so fortunate to have a rare opportunity in attending a "Writing for Conservation Workshop" organised by Conservation Leadership Program (CLP, Thanks to Kiragu Mwangi) in Bogor. The best thing of this workshop is we were trained by a very nice and professional person who works as a Chief Editor of ORYX, a well-known international journal in conservation, Dr. Martin Fisher.

There were 20 people attending this workshop and they come from various organizations that focus on nature conservation such as Burung Indonesia (Birdlife International Indonesia), Flora Fauna International (FFI), Zoological Society of London (ZSL), World Conservation Society (WCS), Sumatran Tiger Conservation Forum (Forum Harimau Kita) and some researchers from several universities such as Bogor Agricultural University, Padjajaran University, Bandung Institute of Technology, University of Indonesia, and Andi Djemma University in South Sulawesi.

Writing for Conservation Workshop on 16-20 Feb 2015
(Photo by Kiragu Mwangi, Birdlife International)

I believe that this kind of workshop or training is very important for us as Indonesian researchers to enhance our writing skills in order to let the World know of what we are currently doing to reach the conservation objectives. Dr. Mirza D. Kusrini presented a very good presentation of her perspective in writing for international publication. Generally, she stated that we have so much information with big amount of data from the field and sometime we have difficulties to publish it to have a wider impact. Consequently, many foreigner scientists have been thinking that we have done nothing. 

"We are not alone", a nice sentence comes from Dr. Martin to emphasize that Indonesian people are not alone on this mater. Many people around the World have the same problem especially those who English are not their first language.In fact, even English people have the same problem, this is because writing is a skill or an Art that we need to learn to better communicate of our findings or studies.

From left to right (Dr. Mirza, Dr. Martin Fisher,
and my self)

Enough talking, let just start the tips and tricks!!!

According to Dr. Martin Fisher, writing a scientific article is similar with writing a poem that has particular structure. This means in writing article, we have to started with Introduction and finished with references, not the other way around. He stated that "the important thing is how to write in a clear and simple interesting article to attract many people around the world to read". The readers are not limited to only English native speakers, but also to those who English are their third or fourth language. 

Ready to write?

Just bear in mind that "Writing a good story" is fun. It just needs our patience and some skills in doing it. But before writing, just make sure that you have all the data and materials you need including data analysis. And then lets rock!.

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1. Write the manuscript when you have just done the field work and data analysis. 

It is very important to do it as soon as possible in order to write something fresh from your brain, or at least you have wrote every detail of your research in a field note during the field work. It's very useful to organize the information or data to make it easy to write the report or manuscript. In addition, some journals will reject a manuscript if the data is too old to publish and becomes less informative.

2. Find suitable journals that you want to submit your article with and then follow the instruction.

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Dr. Martin stated that the most common mistake that the authors did is they chose the wrong journals. Choosing journal is a bit tricky. We have to deal with the "impact factor " and also the "h-index" of a journal which I will not discuss it since I am not familiar with these terms.But explicitly, the higher the impact factor, the less our manuscript to get accepted. That being said that it is very difficult to publish our article in high level journals that have high impact factor such as Nature and Science. You could check the journal list based on their impact factor on Google Scholars' Metric.

Moreover, specific journals have particular requirements. Make sure that every part of your manuscript has follow their instruction. By doing this at least the editors do not have an excuse to reject the paper. In addition, some journals have an automatic "Robotic" system that will reject the paper that does not follow the instruction automatically before it arrives to the "human" editor.

3. Write from the easiest part!!. 

Generally, the hardest part in writing is to find the right momentum to start. So, to make it easier, Dr. Martin Fisher suggested to write the Study area first because this is the easiest part. We do not have to calculate or do complicated things such as statistic analysis, all we need to do is just to describe the sites where we conducted the research and provide a clear, simple and informative map as reference to the study site.

After that you could move to elaborate your Methods, describe the Results, and then you could work on your Introduction and then follow by the Discussion or the other way around (Discussion and then Introduction). I will provide the tips and tricks for each part of the writing structure in my next blog post :).

4. Use a catchy title that the common readers familiar with.

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Is it an attractive article to be read by many people in general?" Not only those who have similar background with you but also others who are not familiar with it. Moreover, do not put the result or conclusion of your work in the title that makes it worthless to read.
Ask yourself "


5. Provide an appropriate format for figures or graphics.

Most of the journals have their own format for figures or graphics. Generally they accept figures in TIFF, SVG, and EPS format that have good resolution (at least 300 dpi). There are several free software to do this. To make a nice map of the study sites, you could use an open source of Geographical information System tool of Q-GIS (http://qgis.org/en/site/forusers/download.html). It is easy to operate and work for both Windows and Mac OS. 

Furthermore, you could use Veusz (http://home.gna.org/veusz/downloads/) to produce scatter-plots, histograms and other graphics for displaying and exploring your data. It also works for both Windows and Mac operating system.

6. Using bibliography machine to organize your references and to make it easy in citing references.

When you submit your manuscript, the editor often looks at your references. If you cited someone's work in the text but you forgot to provide the reference, your manuscript will be rejected or accepted with minor-major revision. So, it's always useful to have software that do such thing for you. One of the very powerful machines is Zotero (http://www.zotero.org/download/). It even integrates with your Chrome or Firefox browser. It allows you to create a personal library of information sources (and to index documents on your computer), to cite references when writing with Word or LibreOffice, and to store information sources from the Internet, including journal articles, books, web pages, and many other sources.

7. Have your co-authors read the manuscripts prior submission.

Whenever you finish with your manuscript, just send it to all the co-authors who have contributed with your paperwork. Ask them to read, add, edit or remove something whenever it's needed

8. Have a colleague, supervisor, friend, parent, relative or lover read the manuscript through before submission. 

Ask them whether they understand the manuscript or not even though they do not have specific background as yours. If they understand without having difficulties to read it, you are good to go.

9. After completing the article, put it under your pillow for one week and then re-read it prior to submission.

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You will find lots of mistakes on your manuscript. This because our brain needs sometime to organize and manage all the information in our head.

10. Submit and have a patience for the editor to respond.

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Some journals may have 3 weeks or more to response back to you. If unfortunately your manuscript is rejected, do not lose hope, use their comments and feedback to improve your manuscript. The tricky part is, some people sometime try to submit their article in a very high level journal in order to get feedback from the reviewer. After they improved it, they submit it to a lower level journal and then get accepted easily. 

So good luck with your manuscripts, and mine too :)

Adopted from Dr. Martin Fisher  presentation on Writing for Conservation in Bogor, 16-20 February 2015