Evan Kuras
GRAD SCHOOL DIARIES
emails science writing bees communication
re: thoughts about something you’re going to write anyway…
Five Sentence Emails
To: aspiring scientists
Cc: current scientists
Subject: Five Sentence Emails
Dear reader,
I used to imagine most scientists spending all of their time pouring fluorescent liquids into Erlenmeyer flasks while wearing white lab coats. I imagined other scientists, spending weeks or months outside, following monkeys around the rainforest or collecting pollen from the legs of bees. What I didn’t imagine was that scientists spend a lot of time writing emails.
Fig. 1 How I imagined most scientists. (CC0 Public Domain)
It doesn’t mean we don’t also pour liquids, tag along with monkeys, or catch bees; it just means that doing those tasks usually requires emailing. Emails recruit undergraduate research assistants that will help prepare chemical solutions and clean glassware. Emails coordinate transportation logistics to and from Thailand. Emails arrange focus groups with beekeepers so you can learn about their hive maintenance practices.
An excellent emailer isn’t that different from an excellent scientist. Like a scientific argument, a perfect email, in my opinion, is concise, elegant, and logical.
Concise: provides lots of information in a few words
Elegant: pleasantly simple and neat
Logical: well thought-out and makes sense
A scientist I know follows the Rule of Five Sentences to effectively and efficiently compose emails. The idea isn’t too different from texting, Twitter, or Snapchat [1]. With limited space or characters, you have to be slick about expressing yourself. You have to pleasantly and neatly provide all your information in a few words such that everything makes sense. This blog post [2] has some tips and examples about writing concisely, although in the context of pitching or summarizing a book.
Fig. 2 Screenshot from Rachelle Gardner’s advice about summarizing big ideas [2].
These five ingredients are essential parts of any effective communication recipe. Scientists use these elements when writing scientific papers, and we can use these elements when writing emails. How might these apply for a scientist emailing beekeepers in order to coordinate a focus group?
→ A character or two
That would be the scientist writing the email and the beekeeper receiving it.
→ Their choice, conflict, or goal
Will you attend a focus group next week to discuss the things you do to maintain your beehive?
→ What’s at stake (may be implied)
We need to better understand colony collapse disorder [3] in order to protect our local bee populations!
→ Action that will get them to the goal
Sharing your hands-on experiences will help us better understand this problem.
→ Setting (if important)
This would be specific focus group details, such as where, when, and for how long.
And for the final email:
Dear Belinda the Beekeeper,
I am a graduate student at Local University reaching out to beekeepers in the area. I would like to invite you to attend a focus group in the next few weeks to discuss the different activities beekeepers use to maintain their hives. The goal of my research is to better understand colony collapse disorder and what we can do about it. Hearing about your hands-on experience with your colony will help us better understand bee populations in the area. If you are interested in attending a focus group, please let me know which one works best for you! …details about where, when, and for how long…
One of the goals of science is to understand how nature works. But nature is messy and it isn’t always easy to figure out exactly how A causes B and B causes C. There is inevitably a lot of noise, in which F causes C and A also causes E and E and F always seem to show up together, and when B is present, F usually isn’t… Scientists try to sort through the noise to discern the simplest, neatest, explanation that is capable of explaining as much as possible in a way that makes sense.
So when I spend most of my day writing emails, I try to keep them concise, elegant, and logical. That is what scientists do, and if I’m not out there collecting bees, I might as well be doing science in my inbox.
Sincerely,
Evan
PS: Bonus points for a limerick
Dear beekeeper,
I’m a scientist studying bees,
Attend a focus group soon won’t you please?
In expertise you are wealthy,
So let’s make bees healthy,
Pick a time and we’ll cure the disease!
Fig. 3 Source
References:
[1] “five.sentenc.es,” accessed April 18, 2016,http://five.sentenc.es
[2] “The one-sentence summary,” accessed April 18, 2016, http://www.rachellegardner.com/the-one-sentence-summary/
[3] “Colony collapse disorder,” accessed April 18, 2016, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colony_collapse_disorder
More From Thats Life [Science]
- What is a post bac? My experience in PREP
- Musings of a Hobby Mushroom Hunter
- Storytelling in Science
- My bonsai journey part 2
- Mentoring Musings
- Three Minute Thesis…But Make It Virtual
- Nurturing and celebrating our offline selves
- Three things STEM undergrads might not know (that you can teach them!)
- Sleeping in a Pandemic
- Wildlife and Protected Areas During the Pandemic
- A Basic Guide to Mentoring Undergraduates in STEM
- A Guide to Graduate School Interviews
- How to Join a Lab
- My Bonsai Journey Part 1
- 10 Life Science Films You Can't Miss
- Protein Perspectives from the Protein Data Bank
- Managing Up
- The Traveling Field Biologist
- More Tales from Trails
- Is Science for Women?
- Tales from Trails: Field Dispatches from Africa
- So Many Choices… The Challenge of Selecting Trees for the Urban Environment
- Should I Apply to Graduate School?
- The Tale of A Conspicuous Invader and Inconspicuous Field Sites
- A Day - and Night - in the Life of a Bat Biologist
- Diversity in the Forest
- Standing on the shoulders of giants
- Tails from the Field: Studying Lemurs in Southwestern Madagascar
- Frankenstein: A ghost-story about scientific ethics and work-life balance
- Scottish Summer Surprises - Part 2!
- Lessons from My First Conference
- Scottish Summer Surprises (Part 1)!
- The Society for Neuroscience Annual Meeting
- How Many Botanists Does it Take to ID an Orchid?
- A Baby Photo Book – For Fish!
- Research Highlight - Making Brain Cells
- Celebrity Sightings while Science-ing
- Breaks on Campus
- Awe-inspiring, but relatable – the goal of any science communication effort
- Secrets of the Soil: Searching for Stories from a Warming Climate
- A Fishtastic Journey Abroad
- Greetings from Michigan: American Ornithology Conference 2017
- Grad Students Meet Girl Scouts Part 2: Conserving Local Bee Habitats, One Person at a Time!
- A graduate student in elementary school
- Minding my Moth and Meandering in Malaysia
- All My Friends Are Dead - A Day in the Museum Basement
- A Day In the Life of a Bird Nerd
- Salameandering – Searching the Southern Appalachians for Gummy Lizards
- You Are What You Eat – Measuring the Impact of Diet on Jaw Bone Growth in Fish, part I
- Spooky Science: When Nightmares Become Reality
- What I wish I had known: advice about graduate school (and life) to my younger self
- Trickle-Down Academics - Facing the Loss of the NSF DDIG in Biology
- Chasing Fire - One Scientist’s Mission to Photograph Her Study Organism
- Field station memories
- An Office in the Great Outdoors: The joys and challenges of being an aquatic ecologist
- Is Milk Bad for Me? Finding Scientific Truths in the "Post-Truth" Era
- Sketch-noting the Society for Integrative & Comparative Biology 2017 Meeting
- Sketch-noting the Society for Integrative & Comparative Biology 2017 Meeting
- A day of inspiration and learning at the Life Sciences Graduate Research · The Birds and the Beetles: Research Highlights from UMass Grad Students
- An American Graduate Student in France
- Science may be a universal language, but for international students, many other things are lost in translation. · Science - A Universal Language
- I Get Knocked Down But I Get Up Again
- Why I care about ecology and you should, too! · Why I chose to be a field ecologist
- re: thoughts about something you’re going to write anyway… · Five Sentence Emails
- Juggling teaching, research, and outreach · Life in the balance
- Welcome To That's Life [Science]
- What happens when a researcher steps outside the lab and into the public sphere? · Unexpected Encounters of the Human Kind
- More ›