Summary of My Interview with Dr. Kevin Christie

My interview took place at the Eberl Lab, Biology Building with Dr. Kevin Christie, an Assistant in Instruction for the Department of Biology and has written four published papers in the span of eight years. We discussed about his writing habits, who he writes to, what he has learned about writing in the Biology field, and how his profession writes research papers that can be published. What distinguishes scientific writing from the humanities is the impersonal, informational tone that homogenizes even the most artistic writer. Scientists who's career depends on writing about new findings and facts about how the world works focus solely on talking about the findings and data rather than the art of writing itself. Of course, it is important to have a flow of writing that makes sense to an informed reader in that field. This is why Kevin combines sentences to have as much utility out of his words and maintain a consistent flow of technical terms. Peer reviews are a necessity and what a peer says about the paper reflects on the primary response from the audience as a whole. When a writer is knee deep in transferring his/her ideas in a paper, one can miss the forest from the trees. Kevin discusses time and time again that it may be necessary to take a step back and reread the passage you wrote and evaluate how it fits into your paper as a whole. Writers, in whatever field they write for, must have the courage to gut their writing and rebuild it to make it better to read and understand. What readers see and judge is the final product, not the entire process of extracting data, crunching numbers, and the writing process. It is up to the writer to summarize the entire process into less than 7,000 technical words.