Why I am writing the Physics Writers Guide

After 15 years of writing research papers and 10 years of teaching and supervising physics thesis students in Ateneo de Manila University, I realized that physics students need help in writing paragraphs, whether it be for a thesis, a conference paper, a journal article, or a book chapter. Not because the students are bad in writing, but simply because they are not taught.

The students in our university take 12-15 units of English classes:

• En 11 Communication in English 1. This is where I learned how to write paragraphs, especially the importance of parallel structure in writing. I forgot to mention that there is still an En 1 Basic English course for those who failed the paragraph writing exam in the first day of the English class. I was one of those lucky few who learned Basic English.
• En 12 Communication in English 2. This is a where I learned to make a research paper by reading lots of books. Research was difficult then. I searched the card catalog in subject and title cards. I searched the microfilmed newspapers by staring at projector monitor. I collected index cards and wrote entries by hand. I typed my thesis in a gravity-powered typewriter with a broken spring for the carriage return.
• Literature 13 Introduction to Fiction. I was able read many short stories, such as the "Cask of Amontillado" by Edgar Allan Poe and "The Necklace" by Guy de Maupassant. In Lit 13 I learned textual deconstruction.  Now, I learned how to textually deconstruct the deconstruction.
• Lit 14 Introduction to Poetry.  This is my favorite course.  I never knew that I would love poetry.  I love many poems, such as "Daffodils", "Fifteen Million Plastic Bags," and "Tiger."  I have a preferential option for lyrical poetry, the poems that I can sing.  My favorite lyrical poet is J. R. R. Tolkien.  I can sing most--if not all--of the poems in the Lord of the Rings. I love to sing the "Oliphaunt," "The Battle of Felagund and Sauron," "O Lorien", "O Boromir," "The World Was Young," "O Elbereth", and "When Evening in Shire Was Grey."  
• En 26 Introduction to the Essay.  I can't find any link to this course anymore.  I guess the university dropped it from the Revised Core Curriculum.  But this course provides a good overview of different forms of essays used in different media: newspapers, magazines, books.  The web was still in its infancy during my time and I never used it in my college days.  I only learned to appreciate essay writing years after I took the course.  My favorite writers who write about writing are Strunk and White, Rudolf Flesch, and Roy Peter Clark.  My favorite essayist are G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc.  Albert Einstein is also the master of the prose.  His one-liners are literary nuclear bombs: "Imagination is more powerful than knowledge" or "Make things as simple as possible, but not simpler".

But there is no course on writing for mathematicians and physicists. This is understandable because the only person who can teach such course on "Writing for Physicists" should also be a physicist himself, and very few physicists would take interest in the art of writing--or in the physics of writing, if such a thing ever existed.

Writing for physicists is not an ordinary writing job:  

• Equations.  There are monstrous equations in physics that really look and sound Greek to non-physicists, e.g., Einstein's Field Equations.  I haven't yet added Hebrew into the mix and all those math symbols such as divergence, curl , and triple integrals, e.g. Maxwell's equations in differential and integral forms.  Though LaTeX has made equation typesetting straightforward, you still have to introduce and explain equations in plain English.
• Structure.  Most papers in physics have predefined structures: Title, Authors, Abstract, Introduction, Theoretical Framework, Methodology, Results and Discussion, Conclusions, Acknowledgments, and References.  But knowing these alone does not result to a paper for publication, in the same way as a stick figure with a circle is not Michelangelo's David.  
• Marketing.  Physicists are in the business of selling their ideas to the physics community; their ideas are sold when another physicist accepts their ideas to be true.  Usually, the minimum requirement is to convince two people: the editor and the reviewer.  But this alone are not sufficient: the physicist author still has to convince other physicists after his work is published until the end of time, e.g. Galileo still has to convince Einstein.  Physicists do not see themselves as marketers, but part of their job is to advertise: the abstract is like a billboard and the Introduction like a full-page magazine ad.

So in this blog, I will be writing about the physics of writing in a language understandable to physicists.  Non-physicist readers may be put-off by some esoteric language, such as how the Schrodinger's cat is like the Cheshire cat: now you see it, now you don't.  But I am catering to a very narrow audience, and in doing so I hope to be helpful to many who wander in their thesis and are really lost.