Hacker News Reader

I had this issue during grad school. The research was the fun part. Writing my results up into a paper and formatting it for submission to journals... not as much fun.

View on HN

Academic here. I agree with you, and I think the majority of academics would. After all, most of us get into the field because we like research itself, not because we like writing. But the thing is that research is useless if you don't communicate it. A researcher that doesn't write is like a cook that throws their food directly to the bin, or a singer that only sings in the shower. It's legitimate that they do it for fun, but no one would consider them to be a cook and a singer, or take their work seriously.

Anyway, if you had kept doing research after grad school and climbing the ranks of academia (I assume from the wording that you didn't) you would see that writing papers is far from the worst part... in grad school I often did research to procrastinate writing a paper, now I often write a paper to procrastinate writing a grant request or doing paperwork... :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com