I encourage my post-grad students to start writing. I find that most are unable to complete a focus paper or scoping review immediately after graduating. So I initially select an interesting recent paper and recommend that the student writes a letter in response to this.

This takes substantially less time than a full review and introduces the student to the literature. It is more likely to be published than a full review but clearly has less impact. I find that once students have written a few letters they get a reasonable a grasp of the literature and have improved their writing skills sufficiently to do a full focus review.

I find it rather helpful for the new PhD student to get to grips with a sample of papers that have strong relations with the upcoming PhD project. By asking the student to orientate herself/himself with some of the complexities through the reading and summarising 10-15 papers or so, I typically see that they sharpen their skills quite quickly, and after this task we can all see that the new PhD student has become slightly better at structuring and summarising science. In most cases a fair portion of the work done can be integrated into the survey part of the manuscript - with a lot of adjustments, of course.

Yes write...post delete ..write again.never worry.slowly u will master

If u see my earlier papers,you will say that much is desired.but now after 8 years I have become proficient.

Practice makes perfect.If the writer do not want to publish,they can do private circulation with friends and colleagues.

Rajkumar, Michael and Uday, thank you all so much for responding because I have only recently realised how beneficial the questions section of Research Gate can be to learn about the research process.

Rajkumar, your advice about writing letters to the editor etc in response to relevant publications is excellent advice (why did I not think of that myself before reading your post). Actually when I searched the literature a few minutes ago to look for examples of letters... I found this very well written article about 'The Value of Writing Letters to the Editor' (Harris 2017) and I will be sending/showing this to my five postgrads this evening. Actually, it might also encourage myself to select a favorite journal and make some comment. Are these 'letters' considered of much value in terms of publications on your CV? As I said earlier, any means to increase confidence in writing should be employed so thank you for alerting me to this avenue.

Michael, what I think you are referring to is what I call a mini-review and I do ask my postgrads to do this as a means of getting to know the relevant literature. I get them to write it is a paper format and because we are usually exploring a new area of research they have generally been accepted to lower impact factored journals, which gives the postgrads a great sense of achievement. I always wondered what was the difference between this mini-review and a focus article and I now believe that the difference relates to the fact that a focus article discussing something (treatment, combination therapy, medical device, system etc) new and innovative that we want to introduce to the clinical field.

Uday, your advice is good and I agree that practice and hard work will make a person become an expert. For more on this please refer to Malcolm Galdwell (Outliers) or Matthew Syed (Bounce) who discuss the 10,000 hour rule of meaningful practice to become an expert, I would however advise any new postgraduate to adhere to the 'Pareto 80:20 Principle' and advise them to get drafts in to me as early as possible. I have been a victim of this error myself as a postgrad and guilty of now showing my supervisor work until I 'thought' it was perfect. So thank you again.

In summary, there appears to be huge value in writing and attempting to publish mini-reviews, focus articles, and 'Letters to Editors' and not just for students. I must admit that a few weeks ago I attempted to write my own paper based on a number of excellent books that I had read and expected that it would be easy, but of course I am struggling hugely because no more than the students, it is hugely valuable to have a second persons opinion and its amazing how out of practice we get.

Thank you all again, and if you are ever in Ireland we have been know to buy our guests coffee!!

In response to my own reflection above, I feel obligated to add a footnote that might spoil the fun: today's average fresh PhD students are not enough trained to write a (mini-)review at all - it must be because of a shift in focus in the (under-) graduate curriculum. I had at least three courses as a candidate on technical English, how to collect data and find information from scientific papers in the libraries, etc.

I say that those skills need to be re-instated through solid courses in the above-mentioned themes.

Michael, it may be just a coincidence or good fortune but the majority of the Postgrads that I have taken on in the last 4 years had good writing skills and I think all were thankfully well able to write a focus article with supervision. In general most learn by finding similar design articles and using them as a broad template and this them gets them thinking.

You have motivated me to write a 'Letter to Editor' so watch this space!!