7 ms·

can you please list out book/youtube videos, anything ,through which good scientific writing can be learned/improved? i will be working with ton of phds this y

can you please list out book/youtube videos, anything ,through which good scientific writing can be learned/improved? i will be working with ton of phds this year and starting one fall 2020.

pintxo 7y ago
I have no such list at hand, sorry. I guess the best recommendation I can provide is: write for you audience. - For the general public (or management) keep it very simple. - For a specific journal, try to keep with their style. Any deviation from their standard might arise additional scrutiny which could risk your paper being rejected. And with the current focus on publication metrics, the actual paper count is likely more important that quality.
arandr0x 7y ago
Ask your PhDs if they have a journal club, they'll translate the jargon to you and you'll develop decent pattern matching. Read the conclusion before the "Results" section. In fact, read the "results" section last. Read review papers, they are way less bad. In addition they tend to comment on the source papers clearly enough that you can use them as a reading guide. Same goes for theses, but only if they're any good, so review papers work better. Pick a good review journal (impact factor is a decent proxy). Email the author of a paper if you have a specific question (on the methods, what a result means, why they chose to put some data in supplementary and some in the paper, etc). Usually it works and they don't actually write emails in academese. Always write to the corresponding author not necessarily the PI. If you want to write papers and not merely read them, reading them is the first step so do the above first, and then loosely parrot what you've seen in the wild with some technical term mad libs thrown in.
nickloewen 7y ago
I think these two resources are excellent: 1. Simon Peyton Jones, How to Write a Great Research Paper https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/academic-program/write-great-research-paper/ https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/academic-program/wr... 2. Larry McEnerney’s writing workshop https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=vtIzMaLkCaM https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=vtIzMaLkCaM These focus on writing papers, and get as close to talking about “scientific” writing as any resources I have seen. But I think good general writing advice will help with scientific writing, too. The book “Style: Towards Clarity and Grace” may be useful for that. I would also suggest that it is important to remember, even in technical writing, that you are telling a story. The more you practice your storytelling, the better your papers will be. Besides jargon, I see two common problems in the papers I read. (I am an art history student, but I expect this is not unique to my field.) 1. I read too many articles that fail to get me excited about where they are going. They tell me what they will say, but not why I should care. 2. I read too many essays that fail to conclude with applications, take-aways, or next steps. Please don’t just give A Novel Approach To Dragon Slaying. Show me the villagers suffering from the dragon’s violence. Then show me how to slay the dragon. And don’t end with the dead dragon—end with the fireworks the villagers light in celebration.

can you please list out book/youtube videos, anything ,through which good scientific writing can be learned/improved? i will be working with ton of phds this year and starting one fall 2020.

pintxo 7y ago

I have no such list at hand, sorry. I guess the best recommendation I can provide is: write for you audience. - For the general public (or management) keep it very simple. - For a specific journal, try to keep with their style. Any deviation from their standard might arise additional scrutiny which could risk your paper being rejected. And with the current focus on publication metrics, the actual paper count is likely more important that quality.

arandr0x 7y ago

Ask your PhDs if they have a journal club, they'll translate the jargon to you and you'll develop decent pattern matching. Read the conclusion before the "Results" section. In fact, read the "results" section last. Read review papers, they are way less bad. In addition they tend to comment on the source papers clearly enough that you can use them as a reading guide. Same goes for theses, but only if they're any good, so review papers work better. Pick a good review journal (impact factor is a decent proxy). Email the author of a paper if you have a specific question (on the methods, what a result means, why they chose to put some data in supplementary and some in the paper, etc). Usually it works and they don't actually write emails in academese. Always write to the corresponding author not necessarily the PI. If you want to write papers and not merely read them, reading them is the first step so do the above first, and then loosely parrot what you've seen in the wild with some technical term mad libs thrown in.

nickloewen 7y ago

I think these two resources are excellent: 1. Simon Peyton Jones, How to Write a Great Research Paper https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/academic-program/write-great-research-paper/ https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/academic-program/wr... 2. Larry McEnerney’s writing workshop https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=vtIzMaLkCaM https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=vtIzMaLkCaM These focus on writing papers, and get as close to talking about “scientific” writing as any resources I have seen. But I think good general writing advice will help with scientific writing, too. The book “Style: Towards Clarity and Grace” may be useful for that. I would also suggest that it is important to remember, even in technical writing, that you are telling a story. The more you practice your storytelling, the better your papers will be. Besides jargon, I see two common problems in the papers I read. (I am an art history student, but I expect this is not unique to my field.) 1. I read too many articles that fail to get me excited about where they are going. They tell me what they will say, but not why I should care. 2. I read too many essays that fail to conclude with applications, take-aways, or next steps. Please don’t just give A Novel Approach To Dragon Slaying. Show me the villagers suffering from the dragon’s violence. Then show me how to slay the dragon. And don’t end with the dead dragon—end with the fireworks the villagers light in celebration.