Interview


Changing the landscape of scientific communication


Ivy Cavendish tells the inspirational tale behind the formation of a writing tool for researchers, TooWrite


My background is in academia – English literature specifically.


I was writing a PhD at the University of Sussex on the intersection of anti- theistic absurdist philosophy and the unheimlich – the uncanny – when I was rudely interrupted by discovering the thing that I wanted to do with my life: solve the centuries-old problem of scientific writing. At the same time, my friend, Algernon, was writing his thesis in computational biology. We were co-working one day – and, like many scientists have found, he was getting incredibly frustrated with the process of writing up. He was trying to condense a big tangle


of research that he’d performed over three years – all the experiments and the twists and the turns, the wrong turns, the right turns, all of it – into what eventually needed to be a fluid, clean piece of prose, with all the information laid out in black and white. He was feeling pretty down. He’d


worked so hard for those three years – the write-up should have felt like a victory lap, but instead it just felt like another hurdle to overcome. After six months he only had 5,000 words down and they weren’t of publishable quality. Pretty soon his time and his funding started to run out, which brings us to that day – the day we were co-working. He was supposed to be writing his


literature review and he was starting as we all do – with notes scattered everywhere, 50 tabs open, and a blank document on the screen. After a couple of hours typing and backspacing I heard fists slamming down on the desk with him saying: ‘I don’t know how to do this, how are you even supposed to write a literature review?’ It was that day I decided – as an academic of literature – that I’d create a method of


26 Research Information Spring 2022


writing just for him, just in the hope it might help a bit.


I handed it over and 25 working hours


later he’d written 15,000 words, which then went on to pass at viva. That was it for us – that was the day


we knew we wanted to make this method accessible to everyone, and after rounds upon rounds of testing and experimenting, here we are, ready to hand over this method we’ve created for all of our fellow academics.


‘Incredibly compelling abstracts’ TooWrite Abstracts is a free digital tool that houses a novel scientific method for writing scientific abstracts. It can be used by scientists from all career stages, from students to senior staff members, to write fast and incredibly compelling abstracts for journal papers and conferences, all while protecting their mental health and having their accessibility needs supported, whether you’re neuro-divergent, non- native English speaking, or even just if you’re a working parent or carer. TooWrite Abstracts is the free


component of the TooWrite Platform that’s just been released. In about 12 months we’ll be launching the paid-for component – the tool that everybody’s waiting for and asking about, which is TooWrite Papers. You guessed it – it’s a tool for writing full journal papers alongside co-authors. The best way to describe how the


TooWrite Platform works is to compare it to the traditional method of scientific writing. The traditional method is very much like writing an essay: you start with a blank page, you draft and you re-draft, it’s exhausting and it’s beyond fraught with accessibility issues. On TooWrite, it’s much more like answering a self-composed


questionnaire, with all the support and teaching tools you would typically be provided over the course of a lengthy scientific course. The platform splits up the writing


process into a formula composed of three distinct phases: planning, writing and editing. First, you have the planning stage, which is where users build up a compelling narrative for their abstract by selecting and arranging narrative building blocks. Next we have the writing stage, where those narrative building blocks turn into questions to be answered – each supported by teaching modules and example answers. And then, finally – once all of the answers have been written – we move on to the editing stage, which is where all of our users’ answers are stitched together to form a single piece of text, ready to be polished up and downloaded. A good way to describe the psychology


at play here – and the difference between writing an essay versus answering a questionnaire – is to compare it to movies versus TV shows. Nobody wants to sit through a six-hour movie, and yet millions of us will gladly binge our way through six one-hour episodes. Why? Because it just feels so much more doable, like we could stop any time we wanted and it wouldn’t feel like an interruption. But we don’t stop, because every time we finish a segment


‘The write-up should have felt like a victory lap, but instead it just felt like another hurdle’


we get hit with that rush of dopamine and it gets us thinking: ‘Oooh, I could stay for just one more!’ Before you know it, roll credits, it’s done. And it’s that cascade effect of dopamine and reward that makes the TooWrite method so much more effective than the traditional cold start slog.


‘Closing the opportunity gap for those who face barriers’ TooWrite is absolutely intended to benefit the entire scientific research community. We have three central goals in creating


this platform: to accelerate global scientific progress through enhanced data-sharing and communication; to ensure that supercharged progress does not come at the cost of scientist mental health; and third is to close that opportunity gap seen between those who are most able to publish (and thus most likely to receive funding and to progress in their careers),


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