Summary of the Interview with Dr. Neel

Dr. Rebecca Neel has worked in the psychology profession for ten years and has been at the University of Iowa since Fall 2013. She spends about 20 hours/week writing professional papers and several additional hours a day checking and responding to emails. For the most part, she edits and writes papers with her grad students and other collaborators in the scientific field. Her intended audience is also her grad students and other scientists and collaborators. She has not written a psychology paper on her own and typically co-writes because that's how the scientific writing field is set up, but she finds that style of writing highly enjoyable. She thinks that the collaboration with others to observe human behavior is the best way to understand the subject and research area. The most important thing to consider for her when writing in her field is to be precise and simple with language to allow others to easily replicate the experiments and understand her findings. She pointed me in the direction of some non-academic sources and Mark Shaller, a particularly good psychology writer in her opinion. Currently she and a grad student are working on a theory paper to get submitted to a journal, but it has taken 3 years, making it a particularly difficult job to edit and rewrite for the journal to accept. As an English undergraduate major, she was well prepared for the writing demands of her job. The one thing that she wished she had known about writing when she started her career is that writing takes more time than she thinks it will and it's okay to not have beautiful rough drafts.