4 ms·
I was top 1% in school and I still dislike reading, because very often, it's unnecessary verbiage. As a senior PhD student, the advice I give my younger peers
by norswap 9y ago
I was top 1% in school and I still dislike reading, because very often, it's unnecessary verbiage.
As a senior PhD student, the advice I give my younger peers and master students regarding academic posters: you should be able to read it from across the room, or printing in A4 and held at arms' length. Most posters are horribly over-cramed.
I see the same things in academic papers. The length is limited, but many people find a way around by including tons for mathematic, which is much denser. When I take the pain to go through it, I usually find all this math to be unnecessary (but it does give the paper the halo of serious research).
- Cerium 9y agoA poster is only big so many people can see it at once. Otherwise it is no different than a single sheet executive summary.
- Balgair 9y agoI agree! To combat this 'jargonification' and make ourselves better writers, some of the PhD and MS students at my alma mater decided to make a journal club for well written papers. Not papers that were good science, but just well written and easy to understand (in our field). We would submit papers and then go over them at lunch once a week. We found: 1) The appropriate metric for 'well written' is that you can read the whole thing aloud and understand the findings in the time it takes a person to eat a sandwich, a bag of chips, and drink a medium coffee. About 75 minutes. Anything more may be 'read' but not understood and anything less means you should have done more work. 2) Everyone loves jargon. The more obscure words the better. The more complicated and obfuscated, the better. I find that I want to grok the research. Most of my compatriots do not want to do that. However, we all think the same thing about everyone else. More complicated papers result in a 'treasure hunt' mentality that many researchers actually enjoy, it seems. The journal club evolved into a 'tennis game' of sorts where the submitter would lord over the others about their knowledge of the paper. i don't want to generalize too much, but I think this behavior of 'one-up-man-ship' and 'I-know-more-than-yoooou-dooo' is core to academia.
- miranda_rights 9y agoYour journal club sounds cool. Is there a list somewhere of the past papers you read?
- Balgair 9y agoWe had a dropbox, but that was only used by me. Mostly we just sent out emails to each other in a giant list. Sorry! >o
- leggomylibro 9y agoElements of Style is very good. It can be a little prescriptive, but it's only 50-odd pages long and surprisingly fun to read.
- eropple 9y agoStrunk and White are prescriptive, but at the same time the book acknowledges that mastery, and its use for effect, can replace the ideas that they generally prescribe. > It is an old observation that the best writers sometimes disregard the rules of rhetoric. When they do so, however, the reader will usually find in the sentence some compensating merit, attained at the cost of the violation. Unless he is certain of doing as well, he will probably do best to follow the rules.
- combatentropy 9y ago> mastery, and its use for effect, can replace the ideas that they generally prescribe Is there any field for which this is not true?
- eropple 9y agoIf I was a master electrician, I'd still turn the mains off?
- leggomylibro 9y agoNuclear physics. Just ask Louis Slotin. Oh wait. You can't.
- eropple 9y agoFWIW, I chuckled--this was a good pull!
- bluGill 9y agoThat is you. Some personalities like long explanations, some do not. Beware that your personality will often miss important details that would be in the verbiage. Those or like reading often waste too much time reading unnecessary details. There are pros and cons of both. (I hope I wrote that in the style you would like to read)
- whatshisface 9y agoEven if you enjoy it, you're still limited by human capabilities: I've seen so many slides that were laden with dense technical information that essentially nobody could get through in the time before the presenter hit "next slide," and I've made some, too. Your goal will not let you say less than necessary; so I say you should always cut every word whose absence won't defeat you. A second is a valuable thing, and you're either writing poetry or working where the second is a unit of cost. (In the extreme, if your goal doesn't require you to write or say anything, then why get words involved at all?)
- bluGill 9y agoSomehow we have switch to slides/powerpoint from a more generic discussion on reading styles. When doing a presentation there are other considerations/rules. Those rules do not apply to the more generic discussion.
- gowld 9y agoPapers are wonderful. Posters are wonderful. Papers aren't Posters.
- norswap 9y agoI'm not sure. Unlike the impression I might have given, I'm actually someone that puts a lot of stock in nuance and dislike simplifications that turn away from the truth. But when you are communicating, it is common sense to make sure the important points come across, then only dive into the details. Unfortunately that is not always something you are incentivized to do in academic research, where fumigation is the norm. I'd also point out that one can be terse and uninformative as well - point in case: most public Git repositories out there. I enjoy reading, and will often read long pieces -- albeit I would wish they were terser, because often they could be, with no loss of precision. I have also never met anyone that, even though they like to read like I do, would take pleasure in reading something that drones unnecessarily. When communicating, that is -- plenty of people enjoy the mini-novels put out by Slate, the New Yorker, ... (and me too, sometimes). I have taken to the habit to summarizing the things I read on my blog. These summaries are of course less informative than the source, but the signal-to-noise ratio is much higher.