In Spring, a particle physicist colleague wrote a blog about teaching Claude his voice so that it can take a first pass at editing papers that he is co-author on but were drafted by one of his collaborators, often early career scientists. I see how it could save time but also our job is to teach

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I’m not naming the person because I don’t have any interest in sending a mob after them. But since he put the blog entry out there, I’ve been thinking a lot about what troubles me about it. The first piece is that if you offload the editing, you treat your voice as something that is static

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But your voice should be evolving. Your sensibilities about how to phrase things should be dynamic, changing in time. But also how will you learn about the early career scientists you are working with if you don’t do the work of actually editing their writing? How can you teach them?

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A big part of my job as a physics professor — emphasis on the professor part here — is training my early career group members and colleagues in the craft of writing scientific papers. And that means paying attention to how they write so I can talk to them about what will help them do it better.

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He ended the first blog entry about this by saying that young scientists should definitely find their own voice, which felt a little “do as I say, not as I do.“ We can‘t ask ECRs to do the important work of writing their own words and doing their own edits if we refuse to model that for them.

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