The editors of Nature Nanotechnology invited Ennio Tasciotti, the author of a recent paper in the journal (E. Tasciotti et al. Nature Nanotech. 3, 151–157; 2008), to share his story of the road to success — from planning experiments to writing the manuscript — with Nature Network readers (http://network.nature.com/forums/nnano/1275?page=1#reply-4105).

Tasciotti says that, at first, the idea of writing a manuscript for publication in Nature seemed “very scary” to him. “When I first wrote my paper (I rewrote it at least 10 times) I basically wrote it thinking in Italian. Very flowery... too flowery. If I think about how many files I had gathered to generate a publication of only 8 pages... it's something that still affects me! But those 8 pages tell everything that was important to say. Scientific English is a very simple language.”

His advice to prospective authors is that you don't have to use too many words, specify too much information in one sentence, or write everything you have in your mind. “Keep it simple!” Another tip is to read a lot of papers, especially those from the journal you want to publish in.