As I work on the sequel to Academaze (it’s going to be so good!), I dip into and out of the original, and here’s a goofy poem that always makes me smile. Very appropriate for the get-papers-written-and-submitted-before-the-fall-semester-starts mad scramble we all know and love.
xykademiqz 
Soooooooooooo relevant right now. Trying to write for a pie-in-the-sky, high impact journal and I’m just opening another document next to the student’s draft and rewriting… I know this isn’t a great approach for teaching/training, but the tenure clock is creeping. I’m not sure with this student if I have time to teach how to go from their very wordy writing style to a 2k word limit in time for this paper to get accepted in time (knowing it could go through multiple submit/review/rejects). Does that make me a bad mentor? They’ll have a couple more papers to go prior to their defense, so I can teach that then? Their figures, methods, SI sections are amazing, just being 1) concise and 2) actually sitting down to write/edit is the challenge I’m facing to teach them.
AsstProfLyfe, it doesn’t make you a bad mentor. A novice writer can’t provide a draft within a shooting distance of how it needs to look in order to get into top journals, and you have the deadlines you have, plus the ticking of the tenure clock is no joke. You can absolutely coach the student on a less urgent and less important piece of writing.
Also, the student needs to want to learn how to write; those who are focused on improving can do it fast. Those who think they’re already awesome, not so much. Many students don’t seem to be aware that you write a draft and then you go back and edit a bunch of times. It’s as if the need to edit escapes them. I wonder if that’s because when they wrote papers in high school or early college, the point was always to jot something down and turn it in for a grade, rather than go back and reflect on the quality, on whether what was written was clear, correct, concise, compelling, etc.
These days, I do various exercises with my graduate students to shake up writing instruction. As a group, we periodically analyze an early draft of a student’s paper (only if a student is willing to allow us to use their drafts). I project the draft on the screen in a group meeting, and then we go over it line by line. I tell them what I see as issues, why I would want something edited, and how I might change it. Students also chime in with what they notice. We get through 1-2 pages of a preprint tops because it’s pretty time-consuming, but I feel it’s worthwhile and saves me the need to repeat some stuff that shows up all the time. We also do other exercises, such as we bring someone else’s paper that is very well written and or notably poorly written, and we dissect it. I’ve also run this exercise where I assigned my group pieces of short fiction, and they were supposed to come back with basically an abstract for each story they read (basically like a book blurb). I got them to read something fun and then reflect on how to distill key elements of the narrative and pitch something in an engaging way. I only did it once, but it was a big hit and lots of fun.
So try not to worry too much. I am sure there will be plenty of opportunity to instruct your student on subsequent papers, and in the meantime you can do some small exercises with the group. By the way, many people swear by this book, which you can also recommend: Academic Writing for Graduate Students: Essential Tasks and Skills, by by John M. Swales and Christine B. Feak. I haven’t used it, but I know many grad students took a course that used this text.
And good luck with your paper! I hope it gets picked up by the high-impact journal.
*phew* Thanks for the reassurance and a lot of great ideas for group-scale writing exercises. I haven’t thought of that before and it makes a lot of sense in that I repeat the same comments over and over again in editing drafts. I’ll work something into a future group meeting!