Resources
Writing scientific articles is difficult. Writing scientific articles that are clear and concise is even more difficult. This was the biggest hurdle that I had to overcome when I started to write articles, in part because my native language tends to dance around points before making them. After my first manuscript was rejected because reviewers couldn't understand what I was saying, I read Anne Greene's book on "Writing Science in Plain English" and I put together a "recipe" for writing that would allow me to revise my writing painlessly and without having to be a Shakespeare. I hope this writing protocol helps you too.
We are visual creatures and, as such, I would argue that making good, compelling figures is just as important as writing well. Good figures make papers memorable and can communicate the main messages of a paper at a glance. However, making pretty figures through coding requires a lot of time or is straight impossible in many instances where you want to have some artwork in them and requires using design software such as Illustrator or Inkscape. Learning how to use these programs is not always intuitive and took me around 6 years to get good and fast at it on my own. This protocol will get you started with these programs (the basis is the same for both) and flatten the steep learning curve!
