Let's Write

Jan 30th, 2014

Let's Write

Pretty excited, woke up earlier than usual. Had a nice reason to be excited for sure. I was scheduled to attend a seminar workshop entitled, “Writing for Change: pursuing social science in times of transition in Nepal" at Yala Maya Kendra, Patan as organised by Southasia Institute of Advance Studies, SIAS with the valuable support of British Academy, the University of Edinburgh, The University of Melbourne and University of New South Wales.

The program was scheduled to start at 9:30 and indeed commenced nick in the time. The icebreaking was done by respected Netra Timsina. He mastered the ceremony and moderated the whole program. The program was broadly subdivided into three major blocks; 

Writing for Science, 

Writing for Policy and 

Writing for Media. 

Each section was guided by experts and flavored by the feedback, comments, queries and suggestions from the participants.

We had a panel of expert to talk with their respective presentations for each section. We got to hear valuable words from Dr. K. K. Shrestha, Andrea Nightingale and Hari Sharma under Writing for science section. Similarly we had Dr. Hemant Ojha and Ajay Dixit for Writing for policy section and likewise writer Jhalak Subedi and columnist Deepak Thapa for Writing for Media.

Dr. K. K. Shrestha started with detailed informative presentation (here) on how to write for science, how to collect literature reviews and concise a whole story into a well trimmed and framed abstract. Andrea Nightingale followed the Dr. Shrestha with an interesting presentation (here) again on technical paper writing. She pin pointed the hindrance on writing in the context of Nepal and yet how to write in way that is both accessible and high valued academically. Mr. Hari Sharma came up with an inspirational talk about our commitments and motivations we need for paper writing and savoring it. Dr. Hemant Ojha then presented a presentation(here) of Writing for policy where he discussed if the science writing is contributing to debate and further on policy issues.

Technical writing is not as easy cake to have but a mountain to climb. A good writing must never lack coherence, it must address the stakeholders whom it is meant for and try to persuade them into the main issue. A literature review we make for any scientific paper(we also call it journal writing or technical paper) provides us a rationale to what we do. It gives us the basis of our research work. A literature review provides a nexus on what has been done and what should further be done, thereby gives us an idea for the whole research work and the subsequent paper on the research. There is no single silver bullet or capsule that defines a formula about how to write; styles differ from place to place and many times from author to author. Any writing how different it might be in the way of presentation must however always be critically oriented, relevant and focused on the issue, up to date and based on logistics ground. Assurance of quality tuned up with discipline and minimum distraction is a must for any robust scientific writing.

A writing should be simple, clear and luring to all. It must be able to explain the issues crystal clear even to grannies who have the minimum idea about what is happening around. At the same time the writing must also be able to address the hunger of peers, meeting their standard of knowledge. This balancing act is one of the greatest challenges of any technical paper writing. Talking about the challenges and hindrance of writing in context of Nepal where we people face the problem of power outage for more than 12 hours a day(ie half of the day we are blank), the condition gets aggravated by having no timely access to the journals and papers from around the globe. Not to miss another big issue about researches and writing papers is fund. We get paid in the form of salaries for doing nothing but drinking tea and reading newspapers at office but we hardly get paid to conduct our researches. This demotivates people form research and writing papers.

Talking about writing for media, this has a slight different scenario where media write ups have low life span verses journal articles which live long in form of peer reviews. Media based articles are long and descriptive unlike scientific articles. Mainly written for two major reasons; policy lobbying and for mass consumption, any article must be very reader friendly and in fact must lure its reader to read ahead. “Do you have something to say what people would like to know?” is an important question in any media based article. No articles ought to be engaged in personal attacks but indeed need to attack the ideas for sure and must never top down its audiences at all. Audiences must always be ranked higher while addressing. Articles for media should be in the form of storytelling rather than pushed display of charts, graphs or numbers. Very few readers would love to decode complex numbers, data and facts. 

In context of Nepal, where we have plethora of media houses working, it adds us more room to write and provides us ample opportunities to hone ours writing skill. It is just a matter of clicking the space in right time which can be grasped with commitment and discipline we show in our writings.

Lets write...