Susan Margulies
The Professor as a Writer
About the Professor
Professor Margulies received a BSE in Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering from Princeton University, an MSE in Bioengineering from Penn, and a PhD in BE from Penn. She is currently a professor at Penn and does research on how the body's cells, tissues, and organs respond to forces or deformations that have been applied.
Important Criteria for Student Writing
Here is a list of what professor Margulies looks for first in a paper (in priority order):
1) Reasoning and Evidence*
2) Demonstrating Mastery of Others' Ideas*
3) Organization*
4) Following the Assignment Instructions
5) Following the Discipline's Citation Practices**
*These are all equally important substantive aspects.
**This is more important for freshmen.
Personal WRITING PROCESS
"For grants and papers, it's good to look up what the format is for that particular place you're submitting the paper or the grant, and then think about what the message is, what's the main part. It's usually not the introduction. It's usually what are the ideas, what's the data that is important to present, and then what is the supporting evidence for those ideas. Then I get to why is this important, why should people care, because that's the order in which I write. Finally, comparing our data with everyone else's data. I almost always start with the results in a paper, then work my way to the methods, intro, and finally the discussion. But each one of them I start with the figures or the main points I want to make, and I organize those.
I actually do all my refining and rearranging before I even start writing paragraphs because I want it to be a very logical development. Different professors view writing in different ways in terms of a learning experience for trainees in their lab. I discuss with my trainees what are the figures, and what do we want to say about each of the figures, and then they start writing. They might not write in the same order that I write. They might want to start with the introduction, but we've already made the outline of what are the major takeaway messages of this paper and what is the supporting evidence and then they can chose to write it in whatever order they want. Then I read drafts and I really comment all over it. I make lots of comments on things and I have a lot of grammar, structure, and content comments. Then I give it back to them and I want them to decide which comments they want to incorporate and which they don't need to incorporate or chose to answer in a different way. Ultimately they make the revisions and send it back to me, and I read it again. So, I actually have the trainees take the first draft. It often takes six drafts of a paper to be done. Sometimes it's great and it's only three or four. Sometimes it's bad and it's twenty. Twenty is someone who needs a lot of work on their writing. "
MORE INFORMATION AND WRITING EXAMPLES
Susan Margulies' Page© 2013 The University of Pennsylvania
