 My name is Guru Rajan. I am from the Department of Metallurgical Engineering and Material Science here at IIT Bombay. I will be discussing technical writing and internet communication. And before I start, I would like to let you know some information so that our expectations are clear. This is a very personal take. I am making this disclaimer up front because I was never trained in English or in communication. And what was also a disadvantage at some point was that I was trained in Tamil medium school up to plus 2. BSE is the first time I started studying all the subjects in English. Before that it was Tamil, English and everything else in Tamil, history, geography, maths, science, everything in Tamil. So when I went to BSE I had some difficulty, but you know you could always memorize. You can answer questions, but the questions were not direct. You had difficulty. Then I went for MSc. Then I went for another MSc. And then I went for PhD. And then when I wrote my first paper draft, it went through 19 rounds of correction. And at the end of it, it was not that it was ready. So finally, my advisor said, okay Guru, this is the best you could do at this point. So sit. Now let us write. And he kept writing and he kept reading it out to me, what he was writing. He explained to me why he was writing, what he was writing. He took if I had any objections. You know you did this. So is this okay to say? Is this what we have assumed? Is this what we have implemented? And so he spent lots of time. And lots of my seniors in the lab spent lots of time correcting my English, correcting my technical communication pointed out things to me. So all that I am going to tell you is the kind of things that I did, kind of things that worked for me, kind of things that did not work for me. Because I don't know from a more abstract point of view what technical communication is and how it is done. All that I will be able to tell you is what I do and how it works for me. So it does not necessarily mean that whatever I say is what you have to follow. What works for you is what you have to look for yourself and you have to get for yourself. If it can be taught, okay, there are famous schools in US which will teach you, I think they are called writing schools, creative writing schools. But most of the times you find that what can be taught is the skill. What cannot be taught is something that on which everybody has to work and has to get to a level by themselves. So I'll show you what the skill parts is according to me and what the parts are where you have to work through. Because writing is a hard business. It's a very, very difficult business. So all I want you to do is to think about what I'm saying. You might have a different perspective. You might have a different viewpoint. And in between, we will have some assignments and some discussion sessions wherein you can share if you have a different viewpoint. But all within four hours. So we are going to be terribly pressed for time. So but we will have and more discussions and more feedback from you is welcome. I'll be here throughout the day. So you can give me or you can write to me. The email ID should be available. So you can give me your feedback or suggestions or any other thing you have. I will promise you that I'll look through them and I'll incorporate them when I teach next time. Let us start with some philosophy. There are two viewpoints or philosophies to writing that I have personally come across. One philosophy or viewpoint is explained very, very beautifully, very poetically by a Tamil poet, Salsupramanibarathi. And he says, if you have clarity in your thoughts, there will be clarity in your communication. He says, That is, if you have to light in your hearts, in your mind, walk is the speech. So there will be clarity in your communication. This is something that we have been taught. We come from a social system in which, for example, I mean, you go to a lecture or a talk and then you come out and you say that, you know, the person knows so well because it was so clear to. How do you know that the person knows so well because it was so clear to? I'm not an expert. I go attend this talk. I understand what the speaker is trying to convey. Then I decide that the speaker must be very good in his area because he's able to explain to me so well. This is a very common perception. And all of us carry it at some level. And I also used to do. And I that made the process of writing always to be very difficult for me because I used to write. Like I said, I mean, my advisor sent back with all red marks for 19 times and 20th time also it was not my writing that finally happened. So I thought that I was having difficulty because I'm not clear about things, which is true. I was not clear about things and that is why I was having difficulty. That brings us to the second viewpoint. This is calling it a non poetic viewpoint because the writers are scientists or engineers and they had an article in nature. This is for postdocs and others. So some sort of advice column in which they say, in fact, writing clarifies your thinking. Writing is not recording. Just don't take a photocopy of what is in your head and put it on the page. It is far more creative and interactive process. As you write, you develop your thoughts. Writing is, in fact, rigorous thinking. This is a completely opposite viewpoint, which believes that it is not that you have everything in your mind very clearly, which you are trying to put down on paper. Things are not clear for you. That is the reason why you are trying to write. As you are trying to write, when you want to put it in black and white, when you want to put it down on paper, then you start thinking about other things. You say this is the experiment I did and this is the conclusion and then that sets you in thinking maybe this is not the conclusion. Maybe somebody, especially if you are writing a paper or a thesis or a report, which somebody is going to review. As you are writing, you are also thinking about how the other person is going to view. They are not going to take your word for granted. They are going to try to pick holes in your argument. So you start thinking about them and in the process, more often than not, I have found that we do realize the shortcomings, the limitations, maybe more simulations have to be done, maybe more experiments have to be done. Maybe this is not the plot that I have to generate. Something else has to be generated and has to be looked at and then I have to make up for my mind about what is the experiment telling or what is the simulation telling. So this is the second viewpoint about writing. What I have found is that all of you have been teaching. Maybe you have taught a course four or five times and then six time when you have a lecture next day, maybe you sit with the textbook and you look at it, then things fall in your mind. I have to first tell them this. I have to then do this. This is where they will have difficulty. So I'll repeat this. Maybe I'll give an exercise here. Maybe I'll end with this question the lecture. This kind of clarity in mind that is getting translated into clarity in communication happens in things on which we are already the masters. Unfortunately, technical writing happens most of the times on places, on cases where you don't have that kind of mastery. If you have that kind of mastery, probably you'll be writing a monograph and not the way or a review paper. So in those cases, I personally found that Gardiner and Kearn's viewpoint that writing is a process of rigorous thinking. And if you take this viewpoint, 19 times that it comes back, then I'm not really upset. Then I'm thinking, okay, my thinking process is improved. And it does improve. My second paper did not go through 19 times. Happy to say. But I'm also happy to say that it didn't get through in one writing either. And then much later, I realized that I was in my third, fourth year. Then my advisor also used to write. He used to share the manuscript with us. I used to tell us, okay, give me comments. And it also used to go through three or four iterations. So anything that is serious that you want to write very carefully takes about at least a few writing. The only question is how many? Can you bring it down to three or four? If you have brought it to three or four, then you are good. But anybody who thinks that I write it down once and then I'm done, is really not getting the essence of what communication is all about. It can happen. I'm not denying that it cannot happen. It can happen in rare cases. But if it is happening for you every time you are writing, probably you are not challenging yourself. If you challenge yourself, it is not possible to write it in one go. So you should not be too much upset about not getting it right in the first place. Maybe second time, maybe third time, maybe fourth time. And there are some tricks and techniques that you can follow. And some of which, what works for me, I'm going to share. I'm also going to share some of which don't work for me. But I know it works for others so that you will be aware of them. And most of you will also know most of this. I'm not going to try to teach you anything new. So I'm just trying to give you a perspective of how I think about technical writing so that it will set you thinking about technical writing and it will also bring some clarity into your own minds. So technical writing, according to me, is mold of gardener's variety. And sometimes it does sound right, but that happens very, very rarely. Let's get to what I call the rules of writing. My rules are very simple. If you want to write like everything else, which is skill-based, you have to write every day. It's not going to be possible for somebody to wake up one day and say, okay, I have a deadline. I have 10 days to finish. I'm going to sit down and write it in 10 days. Primarily it doesn't work because it is technical writing. You are not writing poetry. It would work. You will get an inspiration and then you will write it and you will write probably. And occasionally I have heard of such writing, even in technical writing, some mathematician who died in a duel just the day before his death. He sat down and wrote, became a classic and things like that. But that sort of thing happens very, very rarely. And that is why they are recorded and they become legends and they are discussed everywhere. But if you want to write well, you have to start writing every day. And good writing cannot come from Vakma. If you want to write good, you should also know what is good writing. If you want to know what is good writing, then you need to read through all sorts of stuff and then you have to develop this taste or this voice of yours, which says this is good, this is bad. That is the first step. Of course, if you also can recognize why this is good and why that is bad, then you are becoming a master and I found that you never get to a stage wherein you can always put a reason as to why some writing is good and some writing is bad. Most of the times maybe you can, but sometimes you just can't say why. So, that is where it becomes more of the creative process as Kierns called it. So, you need to keep reading and you need to pick your reading material in such a way that it will help you recognize the qualities of good writing. If you read too much of not so good writing, you also tend to write like that. Now, this third point is very, very important. You're going to have some sessions on it, but in technical communication, in non-technical also, I guess it is important, but there is probably some amount of inspiration as they call in cinematic circles that is allowed that you can take somebody else's work and post it off with your name. But in technical writing, it is a strict no-no. It is the equivalent of creating or committing suicide in technical circles. Not even a single sentence can be taken from anybody without attribution as such. Not even a single sentence can be taken and tweaked here and there and put out for consumption by others without appropriate attribution. There are software which will do the job for you, but sometimes people, you know, instead of taking the help of software in the true spread, they try to cheat. But I'm going to convince or try to convince you that good technical writing can never come out of such efforts and they are not useful and they are not getting you anything in the end. Because like I said, please remember, for me writing is a way of thinking. You can't take somebody else's thought and put it as your own because that would always remain as somebody else's thought. I would much rather have your own thought for whatever it is worth than somebody else's thought, however great it is. Because finally, the activity that we are involved in, namely technical communication is a human activity. We are trying to communicate something from what we are doing to other people and there is no place in it for somebody else's work. If you come home, if I cook for you, if I'm going to get something else from somewhere, I'm going to let you know. At least I'm not going to cook or say that I have cooked and pass off somebody else's as my own. You might even enjoy the dinner. You might say it is great. Guru is a great cook. But I know in the heart of my hearts that I didn't do it. And finally, all communication for that matter is meant for that personal communication that is supposed to happen and when this happens, if you take anything from anybody else and pass it off as your own, then it spoils that mood or rasa, as they call, of communication. Please don't do it. There are other reasons people tell you why you should not do it and there are sessions on which they will discuss how to avoid it, what you should do and what you should not do and things like that. But from purely communication point of view, because the aim is to tell from your side to somebody else what it is, there is no place for anything from outside. Now, the last point I have put because there are so many rules and so many exceptions and so many different ways of doing. What is the essence of all the rules if I try to think about it after some amount of thinking? I have come to the conclusion that if you write to make others understand and if you also write with the aim that even if I am not there from this point somebody has to take off. I have reached some point with lots of effort but for the next person I want the effort to start from where I have left off. If you keep these two things in mind when you are writing, what am I writing for? I am writing to make the other person understand and I am also writing to make sure that the other person can take off from where I have left off. I am not going to do a hajpa job that after reading it somebody has to go back to something else and then again build it from there. If you have only these two concerns in your mind, then any rule that helps you make this is the rule. And anything that you break to make this happen, you are not really breaking any rule. So that is why I have written that as the fourth rule that is basically a summary of lots of other rules but they are really not rules in the sense that they are not to be broken. So in that sense, but this should not be broken. You should never write to mask information. You should never write leaving out crucial information. You should never write making it difficult for others to follow. You can write. I will show you some examples of great people doing that but again it is still not great communication. I mean we know that they have done it. I will show you at least one example of other people doing it but we do know that that is where the greatness of the person fails in that particular instance or at least that is how I tend to think about it. Especially as teachers who are trying to make people understand, who are in the job of making people go beyond what we ourselves have achieved, three and four becomes extremely important. So we will go through each one of these one by one. So what is it that I can write every day? There are some suggestions that I give to my students but the first thing that you should practice is that unfortunately when you do technical writing and this has happened to me lots of times. I tend to look at some other writing. In fact most of the times people tend to have lots of writing around and they tend to read and then write. You do it for whatever reasons. I mean sometimes you think that the equation is not clear. You're going to forget the equation so you want to look it up. When you're looking it up you're not just looking at the equation but you're looking up what is written there and you tend to get influenced by what is written. Then especially if the writing is good you sort of get a feeling that you can't express is better than what is already expressed there. Then you tend to write from there. Sometimes you do it because like I had you have linguistic difficulties. You really don't understand enough of the scientific concept as well as the required skills to communicate it. So you tend to take somebody else's words and try to substitute it as your own. There is also this tendency to if I keep quoting from what other people have written and because they are big people this is called proof by authority and they have written it. You can't fault me because sometimes I have seen students argue with me that I say this is wrong and then say sir that cannot be. Professor Badesha has written it. I have only copied what Badesha has written. Sometimes people tend to think that if they are not sure the sure way to say is to say it in the words of somebody else because you know that that person might not have done the mistake or you have the confidence that that person would not have done the mistake. Because of which it's always a good idea for you not to look at anything else when you are trying to write something. The suggestion I give my students is that they should before going to bed take a notebook and write a summary of what was taught to them in any particular class that they liked. I attended four lectures today. This particular lecture I liked then you write it down what is it that was taught what is it that you liked what is it that you understood what is it that you did not understand so that you can go ask the instructor in the next class and so on and so forth. Now it immediately allows you to write something on your own. It allows you to write something technical. It also breaks this this thing that maybe you didn't get one equation right but that is your own summary that you are writing it didn't matter. Next day morning you can always get up look at the textbook or the slides of the instructor and correct what is wrong. So it's always a good exercise to write summaries or precy of things that you hear which are of technical nature but that is only one of the things. For example I also ask my students to write in their lab notebook elaborate stories. Just don't write I did this experiment. You write what you read what made you think that you can do this experiment before getting the result what is it that you are expecting out of the experiment. You know you should never do a computation or experiment without expecting what the answer is going to be. The surest way to learn a lot is by anticipating what the results are going to be and I can assure you that 90 out of 100 you will not get that result and if every time you are getting the result you are expecting then you are not doing challenging experiments you should get results which you don't expect and that is when we are learning something new and this is true for everything. There are researchers who have found out that if you go to a classroom and then try to find out when the children are learning this is a big question. I have a daughter who is in fourth standard it's not clear to me when she understands the concept in mathematics when she doesn't understand the concept in mathematics and so I always would like to know did she get this division algorithm right or did not get it right okay so they have done some experiments and the experiments show that for example you can put some six standard children in fourth standard classroom. You give exercises the child is always getting everything correct and then you look at their braids you would think you know this is what we have been taught my father said that what is there in math for every model problem solve 50 of them you are through. You would think that you do more your learning and learning is analyzed using some neurological thing I mean you look at how the brain connections or new connections are happening and they fire some electrical signals so you are monitoring them they find that when you get everything right there is no new learning that happens you can also put a second standard kid in the fourth standard classroom and you can keep giving problems the kid will get everything wrong and it'll be told that this is wrong this is wrong this is wrong again there are no firings that happen in the brain the maximum learning happens only when the child makes a mistake and the instructor explains what the mistake is and the child has this moment ha this is how it is done that ha moment is when the brain makes a new connection so you should always expect most of the times the expectations are belied and that is when you learn something new and if you are getting things always wrong probably you are trying an experiment which is beyond the current capabilities and if you are getting it always right you are not performing up to the mark so you should always write for yourself I mean this is not for others that is what makes it okay for you to write on your own without looking at anything and you should always write what you think okay finally technical communication is there to communicate what you think it is wrong to think the technical communication is there to tell the world about something that is existing irrespective of us that is how we are taught as scientists to think about we say science is subjective it is independent of people and that is the reason why you should not use IV or any such personal pronouns and whatever you write should be universal truths in theory yes that is how it is supposed to be but like in everything else in theory theory and practice is the same in practice they are not okay I decide to do an experiment for whatever reasons I might have a wrong notion of something and that is what I am trying to prove and this is not just me this is true for even great scientists Newton believed something that is written in bible so he studies something and somebody else believes something else it is written somewhere else they go study something else but if they are sincere to what they are studying if they are okay with wherever this study takes them if they have the courage to follow it till the end and then accept whatever the answer is simply because the answer is not comfortable for me I'm not going to say I'm not going to believe this if you have that conviction then you will always get the right answer and if you don't get the right answer today somebody else will get the right answer tomorrow and that is what science is all about we are not there in the business of announcing universal truths even though we are made to believe that we are there to do that but when you are writing it is better to think that this is what I understand and that is what I'm trying to explain to you most of the times the process itself corrects your errors I don't know if you had this experience so if some of your programmers then you will appreciate I always had this experience if I try to write a code and if I'm trying to debug and then I'm not able to debug at some point I used to call my friends and say Subraddhi I want to explain to you what is it that I'm trying to do see this is the problem this is what I'm trying to do and as I'm explaining to him I can find out what the mistake is even before Subraddhi points out I know that oh okay now I understand okay this is what the mistake I made so I'm going to correct it okay so please think of writing as a thinking process so it is okay for you to make mistakes it is okay for you to write what you think and keep on improving on it so that you know that your thinking is improved and also write what you don't understand okay when when you read some papers this is something again I had difficulty because I used to take some papers beyond the fourth line I'm not able to go and I used to read you know from title abstract introduction the experimental details results discussion conclusions acknowledgement I read only in that order and I was always stuck fourth line I'm not able to follow so it's okay to stop at that point take your notebook write down that this is something that I don't understand read the fifth line read the sixth line go to the 20th line maybe by the time you have read 20th line you have made enough connections to come back and appreciate what it is then you can strike off that question maybe at the 20th line you have some other questions you can write them down okay and then you can come back and after you do this some four or five times you will be left with some three four questions those are the key questions then you have to go discuss with your colleagues or your advisor or your student over it okay so write something okay I would urge you strongly all of you to start a blog for example write once in a week write about something technical write something about whatever is happening in your field some paper that you read four lines about the paper five lines about the paper okay again it was very helpful for me I used to maintain a very active blog for several years and I found I don't know if it was helpful to anybody else I found it to be very very useful for me that I tried to do that I used to try reading some classic papers try to explain the papers to people with the background but who haven't read the paper and those kind of exercises which you try to do in writing actually help you a lot and writing is also one of those strange things where you know effort is all that you see all the time okay it's like cycling up slope but the slope is not seen very steep only after you cycle about one kilometer you look back and you see how far you have come how much you have come up okay and so it's very important for you to keep at it and keep doing it and keep doing it intelligently and you will see the improvement on your own but you have to write every day at least five sentences that makes a blog post of about 40 lines in a week more than enough you will see improvement in your writing but what is more which is what brings us to the next point you will be able to appreciate the others writing better if you try to write okay this again happens to all of us I come from a place where I didn't have lots of chance to learn music I used to listen to lots of all-india radio and I was interested in music and I was fairly good you know this is classical music it takes lots of effort to appreciate and I thought I had good appreciation I certainly probably had some appreciation compared to my family where you didn't have much of musical exposure and at very late when I was about 2021 I started learning music even now I sing horribly my daughter doesn't want me to sing she learns music she doesn't want me to sing but the appreciation I have for somebody has grown at least 20 times this is a minimum okay now when there is a particular move from one note to another I am able to appreciate because you know you try to produce that sound and you know how difficult it is and there are musicians whom you know everybody says great but you didn't realize what was great about it that you realize now because you now realize what and sometimes you know I am still not able to appreciate what is it that is happening technically somebody who is more music oriented might be able to say no he skipped that note and he stood there for some time and he made this gamaka that is why this sounds better maybe but I don't have that but I still am able to catch that oh this point he did something nice and this is not a journey that is going to end today and I hope that it does not end okay there is still something that I want to listen think about appreciate writing is exactly like that you will not be able to appreciate good writing when you are reading unless you try to write for yourself okay so this kind of writing exercise helps you to do that so it's a good idea for you to always try to write something okay so that is about writing now this obviously brings you to the question what should I read how do I know what to read so how do I decide what to read somebody was talking about research project proposal suddenly you decide that dst has announced that this is the area in which we are going to give funding we expect the project proposals to come to us by the end of October today is august your head of the department or whoever dean calls you and says okay here is the call for project proposal and you seem to be working along similar lines now get me a project proposal you can't tell your head or the dean that you know I work but that is this small area not that small area most of the times you don't have that option of saying or you don't want to say I mean I also wouldn't want you to say otherwise you know like Vivekananda said you should be born in some church but you should not die in the same church you can start your research with some area but it's not that throughout your life you will be doing the same that's not what we want to do we are there to explore we are there to find new things we are there to do new stuff so we don't want to be doing the same stuff so how do I decide what to read I want to now put up a proposal which means what it is going to people who are experts in the area who are going to try to pick holes in what you are proposing and they are going to tell you whether they are going to give you the money or not so your reading should be up to that mark that is you want to read starting today within another one month all the important papers that are there in an area and all the important points that they are making in addition you want to find something new which you want to explore and which you want to convince others is worth exploring that is the second part but at least in the new thing that you are proposing maybe there is some ambiguity because even the experts might not know but at least what is there which is already known should be known to everybody then which means your project proposal if it doesn't have that kind of information that kind of clarity and that kind of authority you know so it's very easy for a reviewer to write that such and such is the classic paper in the area the authors are not even aware of this so I don't think they are capable of doing this research right happens to some of the time how do I avoid how do I know what to read and remember on top of it I want to read good writing okay that is still harder you would be surprised I mean there are so many journals everything that you can write you can publish in some journal or other and the amount of bad writing is exponential now I used to think that this is only because lots of people are writing lots of junk and submitting and getting it published you go go back to about 100 years ago there is lots of junk then also relatively I think the junk to useful information ratio hasn't changed too much okay it's probably if somebody tries to qualify it it's going to be a constant all over and at some level it's not it's not wrong we are doing science we will always take wrong steps and then correct ourselves and move on and with all that junk I mean we have made so much of progress is still good news which is what makes me think that okay I might also publish some junk it's all right the long run they all go away and if it is good it'll anyway lost so I don't have to worry about it okay so we do our best so how do I recognize what is good I mean some of you must have tried this some of you must have figured out what do you do google search go ask somebody yeah yes sir find out find out from others okay you go talk to your colleagues right you will go to the journal and do a keyword search then there anything else that you would do more about the authors these days you can go to their web pages their group pages and you can find out what is there their blogs yeah books you can go so textbook material you don't want to be told that this is known in a textbook so you will go find out what are the textbooks in the area you will read what the textbooks are but please remember if you have a textbook it's going to run into some 600 pages so will I be able to read okay then how do I do reviews of the books yeah sometimes you know there are 10 books but somebody says this is one book that you know it is sufficient maybe that is one book that is what you will spend okay editorial notes abstracts number of citations yes anything else conference proceedings yes sometimes people also put up their conference slides you can download them you can take a look at them I think you should do all that okay you should do all this for about two days after you do this you know there could be area where there are no monographs because DST has announced some project proposal because they are expecting something new and you might not have colleagues because you are identified to do I mean probably you are the best person who knows anything about the area okay and there are also other places that you should start looking up the national academy of sciences USA you can sign up they will keep sending you mails their books cost a lot of money each book costs about twenty dollars thirty dollars but if you are only downloading online and if you are using for your research and personal purposes it is free for download and they have lots of documents documents about teaching documents about future research prospects documents about where us is planning to spend more money which areas they think are promising and why and how what is the methodology going to be and policy papers which advise governments as to what they should do so those are also good places because see most of the times in technical communication so very hard to come across a place where people say this is the problem now solve it nobody says it because even even I wouldn't say it if I know something is a problem I am working on it when I am working on the problem why would I go say that I am working on this and no I am not successful I will tell you only when it is success so most of the times when it comes to the publication stage the problem is already dead there is nothing much to do so the places where you should look for are places where people are still trying to articulate this what is the problem Academy of Sciences is a good website I keep getting lots of mails and wide variety starting from school teaching to biology material science military whatever they have food security urban cities and their growth and how it should be done and things like that so that is also a good place to go look for information but once you have found this information I have a trick that I use okay the trick is that I need only one paper in the relevant area once you get the paper you go to Elsevier or something and find out all the papers that refer to this paper you take those papers now probably with one paper you started you probably got another five you look through the references of all these papers and find out all the papers which refer to them okay that the number grows exponentially okay and you have to be very careful indians discriminate downloading from Elsevier can cut off access to your library we keep getting compliance like that so you should not do it indiscriminately so you get this you look through the titles and this is only one way but fortunately with internet now it is also possible to do it the other way right if you download a paper it will also tell you papers which are related to this paper you can also go back in time and find out which are the papers which this paper refers to which are the papers which they refer to and which are the papers that they refer to so you can pretty much find out you know like they say in our languages you know the entire Kundalini of the paper or Kundalini of the area you can get it in about another two days probably if you do this exercise you will collect about 150 to 200 papers i don't have the time to read all the 200 papers i will read maximum titles and sometimes abstract and sometimes confusions i'm not going to read the rest of the stuff then i still want to know what are the best papers to read in the area to do that if you go look at the reference sections of these papers you will find that there are few which are referred to by almost everybody invariably those are the classics in that area in the sense that you should know them you know sometimes the impact factor gives this information sometimes impact factors are misleading people think that a paper is very important but it might not be in your impact factor radar so this exercise of identifying what is the paper which more or less everybody who is writing papers in the area are referring to and if it happens to be a review article it is great but even if it doesn't happen to be a review article it is some five or six articles then those papers you have to read in very great detail that is the time when you may also have to go back to a textbook because some of the papers they assume that you know some information so there you might have to go back read the relevant sections of the textbook and come back and read what the paper is all about so this exercise you know within 15 days for example you will be able to talk sensibly about an area you will be able to at least appreciate important questions in the area or be able to appreciate what is it that people have tried to do and where they are and if that much of information about the terrain is available to you then I think you will be able to also write a good proposal explaining what is it that you want to do and why and how I also found this to be a very useful exercise with my students that we all not only you know take a excel sheet write the authors write the title of the paper and then some details okay and then you look at the excel sheet in full then you see what is it that everybody has done and where the gaps seem to be okay that is because as humans we are not used to processing lots of information at the same time of this type we do process lots of information at the same time but of this type it's very difficult for us to process so putting it down on paper and putting it down in many different ways right we recently did one such exercise with my student for example just material wise who are the people who have done it in copper aluminum gold nickel and when they did what is the methodology that they used when they used that method methodology which is the technique that they followed right you start listing them in many different ways same excel sheet if you want you know you keep ordering them according to this or that then you get a perspective of the area which is very different from what you would get even if you read all the papers in great detail okay so keep juggling the information in your head and having an excel sheet there helps a lot okay so this is what I have written here how to find good reading material so you should basically backtrack and with the internet nowadays you can also front track you can go back and forth in time and you should be able to identify in any given area you can use this as an exercise whatever area you want to explore please go back do this exercise and find out if you are able to identify two three key papers in the area of your interest okay it's a good exercise to do and unfortunately when we were students we couldn't do it online okay you had to go to the library and you picked up the book in the library rarely you would see only that page you will tend to see some other pages and I have done this many times that you know I have found this paper but it's not of interest to me but it's of interest to one of my colleagues so I'll tell that you know this paper is there do you want a copy okay unfortunately we don't go to the library anymore we don't do this you know we don't browse the bookshelves when accidentally you will see a book and there are many such accidental books that I discovered but nowadays it's not possible but fortunately again if this is a good habit right go to the library not just the book you want but you'll also browse at least one more bookshelf similarly when you are online when you're reading through a paper when you're looking at a paper once in a while from the paper come to the content space browse through you will be surprised how much more of information you get okay again simply because humans are not meant to absorb information they absorb them in pattern so looking at contents pages for example gives you a completely different perspective okay and and then and things that you learn are very very surprising so once I was in the library there was a book called the journal of differentiation how many of you have seen this journal journal of differentiation nothing so what do you think the journal is about yeah mathematics that's what I also thought then I thought differentiation they teach in vsc what is the journal doing fun then I found out that it's a biology journal okay what they call differentiation is that the same cell it can become a brain cell at its issues cell or some bone cell so this process is called apparently differentiation in biology okay the the origin is the same thing but it differentiates into different type of cell or reaction based on so there is a journal for differentiation I would never know if I hadn't been browsing through the journal section okay when is the time I'm going to look at for a biological journal on differentiation right so there is always information interesting information useful information that you can pick up by looking at information in bunches okay you should do focused okay both the breadth and depth are necessary depth is very very essential you can't do otherwise science but as you grow as you become a researcher a teacher a senior person you want to develop the other perspective because there are going to be administrative duties that you have to do you might become the dean you might become the head you need to know how the research will be and and this country needs lots of readers we we need to know where we should go otherwise each one is doing great in their own area is not going to progress science or engineering in the country and as teachers we have that responsibility unless we have that perspective we cannot transfer it to our students and that perspective comes by doing this exercise of looking at things in a broader scale once in a while okay and and and that is very helpful and very useful so you should do that you should do and try to even as an exercise you know once in a while some student comes and wants to do a seminar or internship with that student you should explore a new area by doing this exercise it doesn't take more than 15 days it's a very very fruitful exercise and along the way if you can pick up enough material you will also know about several different areas and that will bring a perspective which is very different from what you would have if you hand looked at those okay so let's do this small exercise I told you about reading good materials I want to show you an example of good right I like this writing because this is where they are announcing a new discovery to the world this is by Raman and Krishna in nature they published about the discovery of the Raman effect the paper is titled a new type of secondary radiation or something okay now if I have discovered something new what would be the first sentence in my paper so how do you write you have supposed discovered a new type of radiation what would be your first sentence we have discovered a new type of radiation right now I want to show you how Raman announces the discovery okay I want to show you how he does that so we are going to spend more time reading this as an exercise now this is also the part where you are going to play a dual role okay till now I have been telling you what is this what is that and things like that now we are going to do an exercise together but when you go back in December you will be on this side and you will have lots of other audience on that side so you should not only do this exercise with me you should also notice the kind of things that I want you to do so that you can do the same thing with your audience in December okay we will have lots of these kind of exercises when we do through AV okay so let's take up this is the first sentence if we assume that x-ray scattering of the unmodified type observed by Professor Compton corresponds to the normal or average state of the atoms and molecules while the modified scattering of altered wavelength corresponds to their fluctuations from that state if you assume all this it would follow that we should expect also in the case of ordinary light to two types of scattering one determined by the normal optical properties of the atoms or molecules and another representing the effect of their fluctuations from their normal state what is the story of Ramayana Rama went to forest and then somebody kidnapped Sita and Rama killed Ramana and came back but that is not how you start the story you always say no long back there was a country called Kosala where there was a king called Dasaratha who had a son called Rama in fact traditional storytellers will even tell how Rama came about there is about three days of story before Rama comes in the first you should always tell a story I have discovered a new type of radiation then okay but if you say no Compton said there is something in light will it happen then you are also packed up yeah yeah oh I didn't think about it maybe it happens what is he telling okay first sentence is just setting the stage Professor Raman starts by saying that Compton discovered something in x-ray now I am talking about visible light both are electromagnetic waves or so I am expecting something okay that is the first sentence second sentence it accordingly becomes necessary to test whether this is actually the case okay somebody was talking about hypothesis this is how set it okay I you did this you found this this is like this so I am going to say that this is going to be the case okay very nice sentence it accordingly becomes necessary to test whether this is the case the experiments we have made have confirmed this anticipation and shown that in every case in which light is scattered by the molecules and dust free liquids or gases the diffuse radiation of the ordinary kind having the same wavelength as the incident beam is accompanied by a modified scattered radiation of degraded frequency there is the bang you make it expect and then you deliver it and you deliver it with a bang in every case we have made we have found that this happens okay and then comes the then the next paragraph starts nowhere he says we have discovered or we have so he says the new type of light scattering discovered by us you know requires very powerful illumination for its observation and so on and so on okay so the title says a new type of secondary radiation and then he starts his story by making you expect why it should happen and then he tells you he did it and then he tells you he has found it but nowhere he says we have discovered I mean even when he says discovered it is in the passive was the new type of radiation discovered by us beautiful paper it is not more than 4th paragraph the full paper is available you can download and probably there is some material that they will share with you so I have the paper so I will share it with you so I want you to go through and read this paper few more times okay just to see the kind of you know the for example you are always taught in scientific writing do not say we always say passive voice okay but look at Roman I mean he is using the experiment we have consumed right and even before that it would follow that we should expect now this we should expect and we have done the experiment the we are different what is the difference when he says we should expect he is meaning including the audience whoever is reading the paper when he is telling we have done the experiment he means only Roman and Krishna okay so both types of personal pronouns sometimes which includes the audience and sometimes which excludes the audience are used so sometimes I mean there is a tendency to think of scientific writing as objective not subjective and things like that so sometimes people bring in rules like this that you should not use I or V and as you can see I don't believe in it and like I said this is not a prescription I am not saying every one of you should use if you feel comfortable you should not hesitate to use if you still feel that no this is not how it should be written you can write the way you want but I personally believe that like any other activity the science we do is a human activity I can only be as objective as I can try to be okay there are things beyond which I am not objective okay so it's better to put that bias also up front so that people can appreciate I will give you the other example which is from Einstein he is writing about photoelectric effect that is the second exercise we will do second example that we will discuss so then let's go to the second example that is from Einstein so there is a question of style there is a question of voice we will come back to it what makes good writing good there is a part which I want to discuss what I am trying to show you is a style and voice of communication one is Raman Telstra Stone starts with an expectation set the background then says the expectation was fulfilled nowhere he says we have discovered the title does say it's a new type of secondary radiation and he uses the word we freely okay and he uses the word we in two different senses now let's go look at another this is Einstein and photoelectric effect indeed it seems to me that the observations of blackbody radiation photo luminescent production of cathode rates by ultraviolet light and other related phenomena associated with the emission or transformation of light appear more readily understood if one assumes that the energy of light is discontinuously distributed in space I haven't seen a more beautiful explanation of light quanta anywhere okay and all that in the perspective not talking about just light is quantized kind of thing he is telling you what are all the things that would be explained he is taking some specific examples and then he is jumping to one generalization right observations of blackbody radiation photo luminescence production of cathode rates by ultraviolet light and other related phenomena then he is jumping to the generalization what is a generalization associated with the emission or transmission of light wherever it happens how do we understand more readily understood if one assumes that the energy of light is discontinuously distributed in space so he has told you the background he has set his hypothesis then according to the assumption considered here the propagation of light ray emitted from a point source the energy is not distributed continuously over ever increasing volumes of space but consists of a finite number of energy quanta localized at points of space that move without dividing and can be absorbed or generated only as complete units again Einstein breaks a rule I do not know if you have been taught but we have been taught to write short sentence right many many writing programs will tell you write short sentence okay but in technical writing a you cannot write short sentences because I can't make any statement without qualification I have to necessarily write long sentences because that is the nature of the communication anyway I am not giving you pithy sayings I am also trying to qualify what I am saying and second thing it is also found that even in scientific communication if you use all short sentences it gives a clip to feel to the writing it doesn't communicate that well and if you use long sentences of course that is why it is very difficult to read any textbook or technical writing you know after 15 minutes you feel like sleeping or feel like going and getting a coffee okay but a good mixture a good writing should have a mixture of both relatively short sentences and relatively long sentences so that the person is not bold or carried away by one kind of rhythm and that rhythm breaking actually helps people to absorb information much better so this is this is known I don't think Einstein had all this in mind but if you think in terms of communication at some level these things would happen okay as long as it communicates you should not restrict yourself to any rules of this type I mean that's what I'm trying to communicate okay in this paper I wish to present the train of thought and cite the facts that led me on to this part in the hope that the approach to be presented will prove of use to some researchers in their investigations you know I have picked this passage just because it tells about my fourth rule first job is to explain clearly so that people can see what it is the second job is to make sure that they start from that point that is why he is doing all this he is presenting his train of thought and how he came to think about the thought why because somebody can start from that point you don't want everybody again to start and go through whatever Einstein went through and start from that point if that happens and there is no great merit in what Einstein is doing and it's very clear when he is writing this is a paper in annal in their physics you will be able to download from online I suppose and it's a very large paper and this is somewhere towards the end of the introduction okay so the the setting of the paper for the rest of what the person reads in the paper he is setting it up here personally these are the kind of technical writing that I appreciate there is another article which is very specific to my area so I haven't shown it here where the author says that all the mathematical steps are explained with the idea that if somebody knows the step they can skip but somebody who is new can follow without having to worry about where this step came from those are the technical papers you should read and those are the kind of technical writing that you should write and you should train your students to write okay they are far and few in between but we should try okay again Einstein tells a story he sets a background he tells what is expected then he puts his hypothesis and then he states is as clearly as possible and he gives a reason for writing the paper and uses the word I and me very freely okay second example where you see this happened just in a couple of examples and if you think long and hard what is good writing I mean I show you several examples and then ask you what is good writing you might come up with lots of answers here is one that I came up for me a good technical paper first you should have some content the most important thing in technical communication don't want to write fluffy papers or which reinforce what you already know okay there is no great merit in telling people what they already know or what is expected common sensically or what is known okay just because you know there is another material I'll do it and I'll also show kind of research is not great we have to do sometimes we all do but I think we should do it as less as possible we want to ask new questions and want to find answers for them we want to find more challenging questions and challenging at many different levels I mean what is challenging today to me might be very trivial for somebody like I said I mean you might start a new area you're writing project proposal it's okay but at least at your level itself it should be challenging and next time when you write the next proposal it'll be more challenging than that okay but it should be challenging at that point for your capability for your students capability for what is possible it should be challenging that challenging comes only if there is content if there is no content or if there is something that is trivially known there is not much point in doing that but content alone is not sufficient content has to be delivered with clarity for communication to happen otherwise communication doesn't happen okay you have all the content but there is no clarity and then communication doesn't happen because even if somebody has seen your content the person is as before communication happens if the person at the other end has changed changed in what way has a better understanding of that problem now for example or has a better idea of tackling a problem based on that concept for example right content is of no use unless it can change you it cannot change you unless you understand it you can't understand it unless there is clarity in the content delivery so the second most important aspect of communication for me is that good content should be delivered with clarity here I want to tell you about the example of two great scientists one was called Feynman most of you might know some of you might have even read some of his papers books and popular science books a great communicator and some of his videos are available you should watch pleasure to watch all of us as teachers would love to be that kind of lecture and then there was a another scientist called Julian Schwinger the Nobel Prize for their work was shared between Feynman Schwinger and Toma Naga I think in Japan three of them shared the Nobel Prize and Schwinger and Feynman did the same work but Feynman diagrams are all over the place today in in physics okay they are extensively used the way Feynman did the calculations is the most common way of doing calculations in physics today Schwinger did the same calculations wrote the same information wrote the same paper so content wise there is no difference between what Schwinger did and what Feynman did in fact that was proved by another scientist that Schwinger and Feynman are talking about two different looking things but they are the same that was proved by Freeman Dyson but even though the content was same Schwinger's papers did not become as popular or his methodology did not become as popular as Feynman's the reason was that there is also some clarity and the urge to communicate in Feynman's papers which is missing in Schwinger's the joke used to be apparently that everybody writes papers for what to let others know that this can be done but Schwinger writes papers to let others know that only he can do things so nobody can follow maybe four people can follow it's like the joke about Einstein's theory some reporter asked are there Eddington that they say that only three people understand general theory or relativity he said who is the third person right so it's like that I mean if only the person who doesn't only one person understand that is not going to actually serve the purpose of technical communication so there should be clarity along with content only that which has clarity will survive and will actually change the field of course the third is style and voice we saw certain examples for me the technical communication happens if there is concept and clarity style and voice is something that we all strive for there are no rules for it but still there is you know same thing with same clarity can it be said a little bit more stylishly and in a fashion which is a little bit more engaged that is the question that we all should strive for there should be concept or whatever material or information that you want to communicate that is actually your research whatever you're doing and there should be clarity in communicating it that you should strive for you should put things in this manner tell a story set give the setting give the hypothesis clearly state clearly what you found how you found and give all the information so that somebody can reproduce give all the references properly so there is a set of things that you can do to get clarity so up to content and clarity it is all rules but then there is something more to technical communication which is the style and voice which is harder to get which is something that you get only as an apprentice you read lots of people who have done these things you try to find out how they do and you try to think that if this is the information how you would present it and then compare and contrast with what they are doing that is where your own individuality also comes down there are researchers in my area of work where if the student shows some passage without knowing who the author is I can guess who the author might be those are the kind of researchers who actually make an impact in the area they have their own voice they have their own way of communicating things and it's like hearing a voice you know you keep hearing your friend's voice several times in there wherever you know in railway station in all the crowd you can still hear the voice that development is basically your develop you are putting your personality on paper when you do that that is your individual stamp on science however objective it be so that style and voice is what you get by practicing by noticing by reading other people by trying to write similar things on your own and by doing lots of exercise and working hard at it style and voice is the finally individualistic each person has his or her own style and voice of writing and you should develop it that that is the point I mean the voices and styles might be different but it should still be a developed voice or developed style and so that development will happen only if you try to write independently on your own without being mimicking somebody else's writing all the time and that is what the technical writing is all about the once you become free of the existing written material and try to explore on your own I think you are on the path to becoming a good technical communicator