The Paper With My Name in the Margins

On the fourth of May, at 4:12pm, I sent my supervisor the first draft of my first paper — four thousand words, six figures, every sentence polished until I could see my face in it. On the twelfth of May it came back. The PDF was heavier than the one I sent. She had written more in the margins than I had written in the abstract, the introduction, and most of the methods combined.

I did not open the file for five hours. I made tea. I cleaned the daylight lamp. I read the email three times — it said, in full: Good bones. Comments attached. This is normal. — and tried to decide whether this is normal was reassurance or diagnosis. It was both. It is always both.

An anatomy of margins

Her comments, I discovered once the tea ran out, come in species. I have begun a field guide:

• The scalpel: a single word — “tighten”, “evidence?”, “so what?”
• The compass: “this paragraph belongs on page 2, and it is the introduction”
• The kindness: “lovely — keep” (twice in eleven pages; I have memorised where)
• The exile: whole paragraphs enclosed in brackets with the annotation “thesis, not paper”
• The question that unravels: “is this what the data shows, or what we hoped?”

The last species kept me at the kitchen table until midnight. There was one sentence — my favourite sentence, the one I had written first and built the discussion around — claiming our results demonstrate a mechanism. Her margin note said: demonstrate is a strong word. Consistent with? And she was right, and the difference between demonstrates and is consistent with is the difference between what I wanted and what I measured, and learning to feel that difference in my stomach is, I suspect, most of what a doctorate is.

Killing the darlings, a eulogy

Writers say kill your darlings; nobody says you must also bury them. I kept mine. There is a file on my desktop called graveyard.docx containing every beautiful sentence this paper could not afford — the metaphor about the crystal lattice remembering stress the way a body remembers winters, the whole paragraph comparing calibration to tuning my grandmother's radio. Scientific prose has no room for grandmothers. I understand why. I do not have to like it.

Draft two

Here is what nobody told me about revision: it is not correction, it is translation. Draft one was written by a person explaining herself. Draft two is written by the evidence, with my hands merely typing. Every claim now drags its figure behind it like identification papers. The introduction no longer begins with the grand sweep of materials science; it begins where the gap in the literature begins, which is narrower and truer. The paper got shorter. The paper got better. The two facts are related in a way I resent.

And yet — my voice survived. This was the surprise. I had assumed scientific writing meant sanding myself out of the prose entirely, but my supervisor's longest margin note, on the discussion section, said the opposite: You buried your one genuinely new idea in the third sentence of a paragraph on page 9. Lead with it. Be less humble; the reviewers will supply the humility. I have read that note perhaps thirty times. Eleven silent seminars, one raised hand, and now this: a professor with a lab named after no one she apologises to, writing in my margin, be less humble.

Draft two went back to her yesterday. The graveyard file gained four residents; the paper lost eight hundred words and gained, I think, a spine. On Sunday's call I told my mother the paper might be submitted by August, and she asked what the journal was called, and wrote it down in the notebook where she writes such things, and then — because she is my mother — asked whether my name would be first. It will. First author. She was quiet for a moment, the good kind of quiet, and then she said she always knew, which is a lie, and the truest thing anyone has said to me all month.