Chapter 05: A Reader-Focused Philosophy: Editing and Teaching
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Description
In this Chapter Mr. Pagel talks about how the Department’s approach to editing crystallized under his Directorship. The focus shifted from copyediting as the main task to determining what an article must provide to meet the expectations of a reader (who might not necessarily be a peer within a scientist’s own narrow specialty). The 2000s were a key period in which Scientific Publications began to develop in-house guidelines for structuring a reader-focused article at the same time that they developed focus groups and writing courses (at first to serve the rising numbers of international scientists at the institution). They concluded that they could teach a conventional framework for assembling an article that would communicate effectively. Over a six month period, they set up classes (with a workbook) to demonstrate how to put together an article with a logical sequence of parts, with guidance regarding the contents of each section. Mr. Pagel talks about how important it is for international scientists to be able to participate in “the discourse that drives science.” He also observes that as Scientific Publications taught the writing courses, their experiences fed back and influenced their ability to edit articles effectively.
Identifier
PagelW_01_20120801_C05
Publication Date
8-1-2012
Publisher
The Making Cancer History® Voices Oral History Collection, The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center
City
Houston, Texas
Interview Session
Walter Pagel, ELS (D), Oral History Interview, August 01, 2012
Topics Covered
The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center - An Institutional UnitInstitutional Processes Definitions, Explanations, Translations Building/Transforming the Institution Professional Practice The Professional at Work
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
Disciplines
History of Science, Technology, and Medicine | Oncology | Oral History
Transcript
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Yeah. How did you end up stepping into the director’s role? Mr.
Walter Pagel, ELS (D):
Well, Dorothy retired, basically. Jim Bowen picked me of all the candidates, which there might have been zero, for all I know.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
How did things change? Did you have specific goals in mind when you knew you could take the reins? Mr.
Walter Pagel, ELS (D):
Nah, I’m not that kind of person. I just react. I look around. I see what people are noticing. I see what people care about. I see whether I care about what they care about, and if I do, then I try to do something.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
So what did you care about during those first couple of years when you were director? What leapt out at you? Mr.
Walter Pagel, ELS (D):
How to edit well for people, to do the kind of editing that they needed and wanted as quickly as they wanted.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Uh-hunh (affirmative). So there was the turn-around time. But the turn-around time changed. You said you picked up the pace. Mr.
Walter Pagel, ELS (D):
Well, earlier than that I changed the expectations about turn-around time. Once there were none, and I changed that. And actually I got a group within the department shortly after I became director to decide what the turn-around time should be, and that included how quickly we should communicate with the author when we had an assignment and how we should schedule things, and so on. It’s pretty much stayed in place since then, our turn-around times. We’ve had a little bit longer, but truthfully, some of the writing has gotten a little bit worse.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
So, the process is an MD Anderson faculty member has a manuscript that they need help with. They ring you guys up or come on in, and say what? And then what happens? Mr.
Walter Pagel, ELS (D):
Actually, they usually send us an email that says, “I’m sending this journal manuscript to Cancer. Can you help me edit it?”
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Okay. Mr.
Walter Pagel, ELS (D):
And so we do call them. We send them an email and say, “When do you want it back?” They say, and we say, “We can do that.” And then we send it back to them. And we use track changes and we type in queries, and they take what they want of it. And most of the time we don’t know how much of it they want. But if we don’t see their work again, we figure they didn’t like it. I mean, that’s way too indirect, but frankly, we have all the work we can use. It’s hard to poke deeper and try to change. So we’ve made decisions over the years that copyediting, while essential, is not the important aspect of what we do. The important aspect is meeting the expectations of the reader. And we have developed a model of what a manuscript that meets expectation of the reader looks like. And so we help authors who fail to address issues in the model. We point that out to them as best as we can. We develop that model in the course of developing our writing workshops.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
When did the writing workshops start? Mr.
Walter Pagel, ELS (D):
I had a talk to give, and I believe it was 2000—it might have been ’99—about the special issues faced by editors of manuscripts written by international scientists. And my first inclination was to simply talk about the things I had noticed over my career, because I thought that’s what they were asking. But the staff thought that was too superficial, frankly, when I told them what I was thinking of doing. And I told Dr. Tomasovic about that. So it must have been later than that, because he didn’t get his job ‘til ’95, I think. So maybe we’re talking 2000, somewhere around there. It must have been around 2000. Between us we decided—no. I think he sent me to Harry Gibbs, because the idea was that this would be an interesting question for the VP for Diversity. And he set me up with his communications consultant from California who helped him with various things. And she and I then met several times and set up a series of focus groups in which we explored the difficulties of writing for people who don’t speak English as a native language. That lead to interesting questions and interesting problems, which I summarized at the end of the article that we wrote about this exercise. And basically, I hinted, if I didn’t outright say, that institutions would find this very expensive. What I was really thinking was that MD Anderson would never spend the money to do this. And I talked about it with Dr. Tomasovic and he said, “Well, what are you gonna do?” (laughs). I thought he would say, “Yeah, that’s too bad.” But no. He said, “What are you gonna do?” And so we did a series of focus groups with faculty and trainees regarding what they thought they needed in terms of education, and we reached our own conclusion, which was that we could never teach somebody how to write a great sentence. We could never teach somebody how to write a great phrase. We could never teach somebody who didn’t learn it on their own. But we could teach them how to assemble what sentences they can write—logical and conventional framework—and so we decided to teach the conventional framework. But to do that, well, we had to figure out exactly what it looked like, which we did.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Can you tell me what that framework looks like, just quickly? Mr.
Walter Pagel, ELS (D):
Well, the barest part of it, you know, is what’s called IMRAD: introduction, methods, results, and discussion. But each piece of that has a series of ideas that must be described in a certain order in order for people who expect to read a manuscript constructed in a certain way to be satisfied. It also satisfies a certain logical sequence for readers. It’s not just that people expect this; they expect it because it’s become convention and because it really does work. So we tell them about four or five things they have to do in the introduction in order to do them. We tell them—and they think they—we tell them about how to put your results together. They think they already know it, but they don’t. Same with the methods. And we tell them about the expectations, about if you’re going to describe a result, there ought to be a method somewhere that allows you to get that result. You’d be surprised at how often there isn’t. And then in the discussion we tell them how to relate that discussion to their paper, their results, and to those that are in the literature, what issues they need to deal with in the discussion overtly. Get there, study it—greatest possible impact. Also talk about the abstract and the title and a little bit about the references. And we talk about publishing procedures, because we’re assuming most of these people don’t understand the issues that they face, just in the process itself, submitting a manuscript and getting judged—getting their manuscript judged, responding to comments and criticism, dealing with that on an appropriate level.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Uh-hunh (affirmative). So tell me how the creation of these guidelines then translated into these classes that you were teaching or the workshops. Mr.
Walter Pagel, ELS (D):
We have checklists online which you can look at, if you want to more detail, but basically that’s not the order. The order is we had to teach a class. What are we going to teach them? We need to teach them the skeleton. What does the skeleton look like?
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Okay. Uh-hunh (affirmative). Mr.
Walter Pagel, ELS (D):
And so we found the best articles we could find. We read books where people talked about this, but not in the way that we wanted them to. We found examples from the literature to illustrate how to do each of those. We messed up some of those examples to show how you shouldn’t do it. And we created this curriculum. Like that. It took a long time. It took probably six months for us to do this, along with all our other work. And we produced a workbook. I will never, ever, ever forget the first time I taught, and it was the first class, and there was an Italian there, and he was just going through the book before the class even started. And I said, “Stefano! What are you doing?” He said, “I never, ever have had anything like this before.” They had all taken writing workshops. They have never been taught anything they could use.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
That’s amazing. Mr.
Walter Pagel, ELS (D):
I mean, I think it’s different now. I think people do know how to do that now. But ten years ago, writing workshops were people who knew how to write getting up there and saying, “Do what I do. Write clearly.”
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Whatever that means. Mr.
Walter Pagel, ELS (D):
“Be logical. Write it as short as you can.” Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Useless advice.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
So where did the money come from to put these courses on? Mr.
Walter Pagel, ELS (D):
Well, it came out of our hides (laughs). We have had probably two positions added to the departments, because we do have another education program—the one I told you about, Scientific English. That one we actually were given staffing for. We have a person on staff who has a doctorate in education with a specialty in English as a second language.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
And that person’s name is? Mr.
Walter Pagel, ELS (D):
Mark Picus. And he teaches 5 sessions a week. Also he has a little conversation group that comes—little, fifteen, twenty people come over here every Friday at noon to just sit around and talk English to each other and to people who do speak English well. There’s a theory behind this program, and I’m sure it’s right—how could it not be?—which is that ordinary ESL teaches you how to—you know—find a grocery store or the metro stop. But it doesn’t teach how to participate in laboratory discussions, how to answer your boss when he asks you a question, how to indicate disagreement in a respectful way. It doesn’t teach you scientific discourse. It doesn’t teach you how to make a presentation that people will understand or appreciate. There’s a tremendous amount of hindrance to the success of international scientists that come about not only from their inability to write their articles well but also from their inability to participate in the discussions that drive science. Their lab, the journal group clubs, their presentation classes, their this, their that, their something else. So they either speak up—probably it’s not an either/or, but some of them are afraid to speak up because they don’t know how. It’s not a tradition in their own country to speak up. That’s the rudest thing you can possibly do. Or then, also, a little that they are actually rude—they don’t mean to be rude, but it sounds rude to the person they’re saying it to, because they don’t know enough how to couch it in terms that don’t seem rude. So they just shut up, and then everybody thinks they’re stupid because they don’t talk. It’s very important, and I’m so glad the institution has recognized that.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
So were these two initiatives established at about the same time? You have the writing and then the Scientific English. Mr.
Walter Pagel, ELS (D):
Not too far apart. Say, three years apart.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Was it—and so you said this was probably around the early 2000s? Mr.
Walter Pagel, ELS (D):
Yeah. The Scientific English was probably more like 2006 or so.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
So obviously this was responding to a change in the demographics of MD Anderson faculty. Mr.
Walter Pagel, ELS (D):
Yeah. But the fact that I got invited to describe this means in some ways that it’s changing all over the country. The council of biology editors invited me to give the whole—yes, I think that’s what it was—invited me to talk about this. Oh, go ahead, I’m sorry, but I interrupted. You had a question.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
No, no I didn’t. I was actually just trying to figure out where to go next. I mean, I’m interested, obviously. The teaching that you do here is so critical, and I just want to make sure that I have a really good understanding of what exactly it is you offer. And then how it works more for the faculty members. So you do courses on articles, but then also on grant writing, correct? And then— Mr.
Walter Pagel, ELS (D):
We invite a speaker on grant writing. And the theory is that nobody would believe us, since we don’t actually ever participate in study sections. We don’t ever actually write grants. Or they wouldn’t believe us as much as they would somebody who’s been through it all, and we have discovered a very effective group who have themselves developed a model of a good grant proposal. We use that model in our editing of grants, because we believe in it, again. It’s just structured in a way that makes all the sense in the world. There’s a difference between grant writing and manuscript writing. I’m sure you know that. And you have to deal with issues from people you don’t know anything about, who, while you wish they were as expert as you, they are not. And while you wish they would give you the benefit of the doubt, they won’t, and so on and so forth.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
What’s the organization you work with for the grant writing? Mr.
Walter Pagel, ELS (D):
It’s called Grant Writers, Incorporated.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Nice and simple and logical. (laughs) Is there anything else you’d like to say about the significance of those teaching initiatives? Mr.
Walter Pagel, ELS (D):
Well, they have influenced our ability to edit, out of the fact that we had to construct this model. We all knew that things were wrong with manuscripts, and we did our best to deal with that. We didn’t have a systematic—things were missing from manuscripts, and we did our best to deal with that. But now we have a structure in which to be able to systematically notice what’s missing and not leave it to chance, quite so much anyway. So really, the editing, what isn’t there has been tremendously improved by our work and education.
Recommended Citation
Pagel, Walter ELS and Rosolowski, Tacey A. PhD, "Chapter 05: A Reader-Focused Philosophy: Editing and Teaching" (2012). Interview Chapters. 1274.
https://openworks.mdanderson.org/mchv_interviewchapters/1274
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