I’ll make this brief. It’s challenging to structure our work as we start a new science writing project—or any new project, for that matter. We don’t know where to begin, what to write about, or what to read up on. Meanwhile, all other writers we follow appear to identify interesting topics seamlessly. It’s intimidating, somehow, but it has a simple solution: the rookie researcher. Becoming a rookie researcher isn’t a metaphor—it’s a method.
The explicit approach struck me as I was having a coffee with an ex-colleague who wanted to break into science writing. She shared her concerns about the blank page, expressing that she needed someone to frame the topic before she could start writing. “I feel I wouldn’t know where to start without a prepared structure or outline,” she told me.
Bloggers and journalists need inspiration to craft their content. Where do they get that inspiration, and how do they find it so reflexively? Because they know their topic.
I told my ex-colleague to become a rookie researcher.
Let’s get the doubters out of the way. What I’m about to describe can seem so generic and familiar that it’d be fair to question why I even hit Publish on this post. But I encounter people sharing the same concern frequently, in one way or another.
Although this simple strategy seems like a just-do-it or learn-by-doing tip, it’s not—not really. Approaching projects like this will calm some nerves and lower the overwhelming feeling of not knowing where or how to start. All it takes is to visualize being the rookie researcher again. Our titles (BSc, MSc, or PhD) don’t matter. What matters is that we’re the rookie researchers in a field.
I told my ex-colleague to imagine her first week as a PhD student. She’d probably start her day by reading any literature she’d come across related to her field. That’s the initial broad framing of a rookie researcher.
As she started working on a more specific project, she’d narrow her framing to solve more specific problems. Any uncertainty or knowledge gap would indicate what to read next, and any new information would create new, more targeted questions.
If she were to scroll through the research articles she’d read during her first PhD months, she might notice they contain more highlights overall, and those highlights tended to be more general than her later reads.
For a writer or communicator, each of these questions, highlights, or references is a potential topic we can write about. As we develop as creators, they become more narrow, structured, and intentional.
I don’t write about the microbiome or CRISPR/Cas9, as I used to; I write about how to best write about them. Anything I come across that can help improve science communication inspires my next topic. So did this coffee with my ex-colleague. But I had to go through the foundational early phase to get here.
If we worry that we lack topic ideas or don’t know where to start or how to structure our writing, we’ll visualize the rookie researcher. That person started in a broad, unknown field without knowing how to structure the work. She eventually became intentional and purposeful in her project.
Don’t chase the structure.
Start with curiosity. Read. Highlight. Ask questions.
You’ll begin to notice patterns.
The broad narrows.
The messy becomes clearer.
A new topic idea emerges.
Store, structure, repeat.
Thank the rookie researcher.
So don’t panic. Let the funnel take you where you’re going, even if that means you start writing about something extremely broad.
That’s all. Just something I needed to put into words.
