Chapter 08: Offering Support for MD Anderson Writers
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Description
Mr. Pagel begins this Chapter reviewing how the Department of Scientific Publications offers editorial and instructional writing support to MD Anderson faculty. He then talks about Words into Print, a book of guidelines for writers published in-house that has evolved through three editions (1983, 1992, 2000). He notes that the Department has learned more with each edition published and expects that it will go through another, two-volume edition in which writing skills and writing process are treated separately. He then summarizes the mission of the Department’s courses: to teach a systematic was of writing an article that satisfies the conventions of a field and meets reader expectations. The practice of teaching how to accomplish this has evolved slowly, but had never altered the basic philosophy established years ago. Mr. Pagel then talks about funding for the Department’s writing courses. He underscores that the courses are a source of great pride for the Department, and that they have worked hard to earn a reputation among a community of researchers who might never believe that a nonscientist could have credibility and authority to aid them in publishing their work.
Identifier
PagelW_02_20120810_C08
Publication Date
8-10-2012
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 10, 2012
Topics Covered
The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center - An Institutional Unit Institutional Processes 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:
I noticed too from that timeline the words into print publication—that you—ooh, you’re reaching for something here. Here it is. Wow! The Handbook of Services, Department of Scientific Publications. Can you tell for the benefit of the recording device what this was?
Walter Pagel, ELS (D):
Our department felt the need to describe what we did in ways that would appeal to our primary clients who were the faculty and trainees of the institution who wanted to publish primarily in the journals—in biomedical research journals, so we did a little something that told people what we did. Well, we began to realize that the best way to publicize your ability to help people was to tell them something they needed to know, not something you wanted them to know, and so the next issue or version to print was more about how to write articles, how to write good grant proposals.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
And when did this one come out?
Walter Pagel, ELS (D):
I don’t know but there’s a date in there somewhere.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
I’ll have to look. Oh, 1983. And then reprinted 1992. Second edition 1992.
Walter Pagel, ELS (D):
Here’s the third edition. We decided to be slick.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Look at this. Yeah. Ooh, I like your translucent front page there. And how come you decided to go slick?
Walter Pagel, ELS (D):
So people wouldn’t think we were old-fashioned. So people would think that we were modern.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Are you?
Walter Pagel, ELS (D):
Sure.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Yeah, well you’ve upgraded typeface and—so who did the design for this—the layout?
Walter Pagel, ELS (D):
Actually somebody on staff was the primary designer, worked with a print designer at the UT print shop. But she had a kind of vision that I liked; others not so much, but I did.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
What did you like about her vision?
Walter Pagel, ELS (D):
It was attention getting.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
It is. It’s a nice object. I like the silvery front cover. It all visually relates really well. Why did other people not like it so much?
Walter Pagel, ELS (D):
It’s attention getting.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Who was the staff member whose vision resulted in that?
Walter Pagel, ELS (D):
Her name was Julie Starr. Two R’s.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
The interviewer probably isn’t supposed to vote, but I vote for that one, too. And was there any—were there any—was there any tweaking to the content?
Walter Pagel, ELS (D):
Some. Yeah, we learn more every year we work. So, we learned more about how to write a good this or that and those changes showed up in there. We now know even more, and that—this has got to be at least ten years old.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
You said 2000?
Walter Pagel, ELS (D):
In 2000, okay, so it’s twelve years old, and we haven’t done anything since. We now think that a single volume would not be as useful as dividing it up into pieces—journal articles, grant proposals—because we know so much more about each of those and because the desire to know about those things happens when you’re ready to write this or ready to write that and so—I don’t know. We haven’t sat down to talk about it, but presumably it would be set up in a way that a person could actually see a template of what to do and use it right then when they’re writing it.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Interesting. So really addressing kind of process issues as well as content. Very neat. Is that something—is that a discussion you’re hoping to initiate before you retire?
Walter Pagel, ELS (D):
No. No time.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Leave that for others?
Walter Pagel, ELS (D):
Yes. They’re already thinking about it. It’s just we have a lot of different things we want to do, and where does that fall on that list? Maybe not too terribly high. We’re doing classes. We teach people how to write in a sense that most don’t understand. That’s not—when people think you’re teaching them how to write, they think you’re teaching them how to write sentences and paragraphs, but that is not what we’re doing. We’re doing just what I said, which is teaching them what the template of the conventional reader expect—meets the needs of conventional readers. Expectations of conventional readers I should say; readers who expect your article to match the conventions of the field. That’s probably the best way to say it. So this book—if we did a book that I described—would be really a complement to our workshops we already do. We don’t have to do this book in order to have the effect we want to have.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
From the beginning when you were talking about—I remember when we started the conversation about guidelines. The way you told the story it was like a feedback loop. The guidelines were in production, then you started teaching, then the teaching started to help the guidelines crystallize, and it sounds like that is still going on.
Walter Pagel, ELS (D):
Right.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Yeah. So it’s an interesting process. Where do you see—is there a new direction? Or in what direction do you see your classes going in the near future? Are they evolving in a certain way?
Walter Pagel, ELS (D):
They are evolving but not rapidly and I think we—this sounds complacent but I think that we hit the nail on the head when we designed it in the first place, and the revisions that have occurred since are that we—this and that wasn’t as clear as it should be. This and that—we could have better examples of that. We maybe should teach this part before that part. Not important changes. The most important thing we did I can’t imagine us—sitting here I can’t imagine us deciding that we should take a different direction than the one we took.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
I asked you how it was funded in the beginning and you said you were kind of doing it by the seat of your pants—I think was the phrase you used—and I’m wondering, is that still the case? Does the teaching have funding at this point?
Walter Pagel, ELS (D):
Teaching have funding.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
These classes that you do.
Walter Pagel, ELS (D):
We have some positions that are identified for the education program. They don’t begin to cover all the resources we have to use in order to teach, but they make it easier for the teachers to do the work. So, yes, it’s funded. But we still have to do a little bit—our other work is still affected, but I don’t think that’s something exceptional or unusual in this institution or maybe any institution. If you take on a new initiative, you’re likely to have to use resources that you already have on hand, and you’re not likely to get the funding to have—to pay for all the work that you have to do in order to do that project.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
So, you don’t—
Walter Pagel, ELS (D):
I doubt that the Historical Resources Center is one-hundred percent funded by new funds. Much of the library has had to carve out—Stephanie the head librarian has to carve out some extra time out of their time. Probably the Internet—the electronic support comes out of people they already had. They love doing it but nevertheless it is people who already had full-time jobs now had to devote some of their energy to a new project.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
So you don’t—from what I’m seeing is that you don’t interpret the fact that the funding—the given doesn’t fully cover the teaching as a lack of—indication of lack of support by the institution.
Walter Pagel, ELS (D):
No. Do I wish they’d give us more? Yes. Do I think they should give us more? Yes. Do we ask for it every year? Yes. Do I think when they don’t give it to us that they think we’re wasting our time? No. I know they don’t think we’re wasting our time.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Yeah, it’s just political, financial reality.
Walter Pagel, ELS (D):
Yeah. It’s all getting it to balance. Would I make the same decisions they did? No, but—
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Is there anything else you want to say about the teaching at this point? The teaching that Scientific Publications does?
Walter Pagel, ELS (D):
No, I know I said some things the last time, and I don’t think I have new things to say. It’s a source of great pride. Editors—I don’t know if I want to publicly categorize them this way, but I think that they would accept the notion that for the most part they’re introverts and not thought of as the sorts of people who would stand up in front of scientists who are world-class thinkers and tell them a way that they can write better in a way that’s authoritative enough for the audience to feel like they were getting valid information. I doubt that—I’m certain, in fact, that from the beginning there were huge doubts about whether they could pull it off, and I think that they have come to see—with time and practice and training—that they can hold their own in that situation.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
And you feel that and it sounds like there’s an ethos in Scientific Publications that everybody who participates in the teaching kind of feels the same way, that there’s—this department lends the weight of that sort of confidence or authority that they can speak to scientists in that way.
Walter Pagel, ELS (D):
I don’t know. I think that maybe this is more related to the fact that what we do every day, day in and day out—which is to edit—gives us an insight and a familiarity that very few others could bring to something like this and we realize that. I know we can’t tell them how to do their experiments, but yes, we can tell them how to describe them and how to—once we know what they think is the importance of their experiments we can tell them—give them advice about how to construct a logical, powerful, and convincing argument for the importance of this work.
Recommended Citation
Pagel, Walter ELS and Rosolowski, Tacey A. PhD, "Chapter 08: Offering Support for MD Anderson Writers" (2012). Interview Chapters. 1277.
https://openworks.mdanderson.org/mchv_interviewchapters/1277
Conditions Governing Access
Open
