Posted 12:45 p.m. Tuesday, Sept. 2, 2025
Writing in Biology
The Write Here, Write Now blog invites writers from the University of Wisconsin and La Crosse communities to respond to a series of questions that shed light on their writing lives. As readers of the blog will discover, learning to write is an ongoing, life-long process and all writers, from first-year students to career professionals, benefit from reflecting on the writing process and sharing that process with others.
Name and Title: Dr. Anne Galbraith, Associate Professor
Department, Speciality Area, and Classes Typically Taught: I am a Geneticist in the Biology Department. I primarily teach Genetics, Human Molecular Genetics and the lab, and Advanced Genetics (a graduate class). I also teach a section of First Year Seminar called STEM Strong: Why Women Matter.
Current Writing Project: My lab uses bread/beer yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae) to try to understand how an antimicrobial works to stop the growth of bacteria and yeast. The end goal is to figure out how this compound might be used one day as an antibiotic and/or antifungal drug.
1. What are you currently reading?
Mostly I have been reading science articles related to my research. HOWEVER, I do have a large pile of fiction novels that I have been accumulating over the past few years which I have been acquiring faster than I have been reading. :-) (Fire Keeper's Daughter, How to Solve Your Own Murder, Braiding Sweetgrass, Demon Copperhead, Remarkably Bright Creatures, a bunch of Stephen King novels, and others).
2. What type(s) of writing do you regularly engage in?
I do a lot of science writing and editing for my graduate students who are working on their thesis proposals and grants. I also write a lot of reports for committees that I am on, and of course, I write syllabi and exams and assignments for classes. I also write scads of emails, often with detailed instructions for things, which means the writing must be very clear.
3. When/where/how do you write? What are your “writing necessities”?
My best times for writing are early mornings or later evenings, but I write whenever the mood sets in, or when I must to get something done. If I really need to focus, I MUST have background noise. (I have never been able to work in a library, for example- the quiet makes me hear every little sound and that is super distracting). That either means music on if I am home (something I don't need to pay attention to), or if being home is too distracting, I sit in a coffee shop with music and people noise. I also must have my phone put away or I am tempted to just fiddle around with that instead of writing. Once I get going, I am fine- it's just getting started that is difficult.
4. What's the best writing advice you've received?
When writing a paper, make an outline first! It's so much easier to write a well-organized paper when you are organizing short phrases (that you flesh out later) instead of long paragraphs.
5. How has your work experience influenced how you write?
I read a ton when I was growing up, and in grade school I learned how to diagram sentences. (Look it up if this concept is foreign to you- it was basically analyzing the parts of a sentence). I really think these two things played a major role in laying the groundwork for my ability to write well in high school and college. I had to retrain my writing in graduate school some because science writing is very different from most other kinds of writing, but being good at the basics was really helpful.
6. What is your best tip for getting started and/or for revision? How do you avoid writer’s block?
It's easier for me to revise than to start from scratch, so I just get anything down, even if it's awful. (If I'm writing a paper, then what I get down is an outline made of short phrases). Once the psychological hurdle of "starting" is over, I am in the revision stage already! Depending on what I am writing (an email versus a paper), revisions can take a few minutes or a few months. Even though revising takes more TIME than starting, revising is easier for me, maybe because I've done so much editing for others during my career.