Every post has a story. This one starts a few years ago, when I was still in Barcelona. At the time, I was wondering how to help my grad students improve their writing skills, especially for fellowship applications with few results to speak of.

So I set out to create a small mental map with the idea that I would be able to share it with my students. I wrote down some ideas and made a draft post that just sat there... and along came ChatGPT.

And now everybody is a good writer.

Time has finally come to end a long silence on the blog, and I thought that this post would give me the occasion to make a point. There are some things that only you can do, like dreaming, suffering, liking etc. Having someone else do it for you simply makes no sense.

There is more to writing than producing a text. Somewhere in the middle of it, there is a part that only you can do. It is a piece of you. It’s because of this part that I started the blog in the first place, and it’s one thing that ChatGPT did not change.

So here is what I told my grad students whenever they had to apply for a grant or a fellowship.

1. Bonjour!

Before addressing anyone, you greet them. A single word like “bonjour” already gives a ton of information: it says that I am paying attention to you, that I am not aggressive, that I speak French, and that I invite you to communicate in this language. With one word, I identify the rules of communication that I would like to set forth for our interaction. Never mind that I am wishing you a good day. This is a phatic expression: the words are here only to bridge a social gap.

The very first sentence of a scientific document is also a greeting. The author has to say “I am one of yours! I know the rules”. There are many ways to achieve this, but I usually like to start with a widely accepted fact that sets the scope of the project. Opening with facts is a simple reminder that the scientific discourse aims to be objective and rooted in facts instead of opinions. This is my personal preference, but anything goes, as long as it says “Hello! I am a scientist”.

2. What is the problem?

Having said “Hello!”, we need to state our business. The main pitfall is to give in to the impostor syndrome, or put simply, to the universal fear of not being important enough. A common practice is to mention human suffering, present or future, in hope of getting attention from the audience. Well... there is a better way.

One thing that scientists love is solving problems. Words like “unknown” are very good at getting their attention. The readership will usually be more interested in a scientific problem, i.e., one that can be solved, than in some ill-defined or bigger-than-life issue. So my recommendation is to tell the actual problem you want to solve. This may look somewhat unimpressive, especially in fields where exaggeration is the norm, but we will address this very issue.

3. Why is the problem a problem?

The risk of our approach is that the reader will in general not know the importance of the problem. Scientists love every problem, but they still have a preference for the ones that matter. This is why I like to explain one thing that cannot be done without first solving the problem.

And here I like to choose the most important or impactful consequence that comes to mind. The history of science is full of examples where solving an unassuming problem led to a revolution. Heating black objects gave rise to quantum mechanics, growing bacteria in a dish led to the discovery of antibiotics etc.

For someone outside the field, it may be hard to immediately see why the problem matters. But this can be explained by giving the context where the problem arose, and scientists will usually get the point.

4. Why is the problem not solved?

If things are going our way, there should be some push back. Indeed, we just explained that we are working on a very important problem, so it is only natural to wonder why it has not been solved already.

And this is where we have a lot of creative freedom. Solving a scientific problem is a bit of a “miracle” in the sense that it takes people, skills, funding, infrastructure, political will, technologies, ethical approval, luck and so many other things. We just need to choose one that is currently missing.

We have to think forward and pick something that we have secured or that makes us strong, like technologies, primary materials or some specific knowledge. We will see why shortly.

5. Why can you solve the problem?

We rose the stakes by explaining that the problem is very hard and maybe impossible to solve, so now we have to propose a way forward, otherwise we will face massive resistance. And we have to do this without arrogance of course.

Thankfully, we have a solid answer for the difficulty that we just presented as the main barrier. All that is left to do is explain that we are in a position to address the problem. We are not smarter or more hard-working than other scientists, we just happen to have an opportunity that no one else has.

Putting it all together

As a concrete example, here is how I could have started any grant application at the time I was working on the interactions between integrated viruses and the genome of the host cell.

HIV-1 integrates into the genome of the host cell, where it may either be active or lay dormant in a state called latency. It is presently unknown how the integration site in the genome may impact the outcome. However, it is crucial to understand how latent viruses continuously awaken in the body of AIDS patients and make the disease a life-long burden. One of the main difficulties to address the question is the lack of genome-wide technologies to study the behavior of integrated viruses at scale. Our laboratory has developed high-throughput technologies to map integrated viruses and simultaneously measure their expression in order to sketch their activity landscape throughout the genome.

Epilogue

The five-step introduction served me and my students well for multiple years. It allowed me to share a template for writing and to discuss the purpose of each sentence. I also found that it works well in other contexts, like for scientific articles, so I reused this template in multiple areas. Overall, I do think of it as the only good way to start a document but rather as the default plan to fall back on if you do not have a better one.