Writing is usually portrayed as hard, joyless work. Great authors, it is said, must suffer from a sort of “creative madness” and work in mindless binges under endless pressures of deadlines, exhaustion, and criticism. Writing often is said to be stressful, unpleasant, and disliked. Yet, people choose to write for a living. If suffering were really the sole route to successful writing, why would anyone choose it?

Yes, it is true that stress is associated with writing that is delayed and then forced under deadlines. However, there are more attractive and productive alternatives to writing in tedious, joyless ways. We’ve already walked you through some of the preliminaries. In this chapter we guide you along a bit further. We will offer guidelines for deciding when to begin actually writing. We’ll help you deal promptly with matters of authorship, both to minimize the potential for misunderstandings and to guide collaboration and any division of responsibility. We’ll remind you of ways to use word-processing tools that will help you write more proficiently, avoiding pitfalls while becoming adept at using efficiency-enhancing features. We’ll show you how to ease the writing task by paying attention to standard format conventions. Then, in chapters that follow, we’ll walk you through the what-goes-where to write each section of the most common types of scientific papers.