Why do academics choose useless titles for articles and chapters? Four steps to getting a better title. An informative title for an article or chapter maximizes the likelihood that your audience correctly remembers enough about your arguments to re-discover what they are looking for. Without embedded cues, your work will sit undisturbed on other scholars’ PDF libraries, or languish unread among hundreds of millions of other documents on the Web. Patrick Dunleavy presents examples of frequently used useless titles and advises on using a full narrative title, one that makes completely clear your argument, conclusions or findings. When you want to get your paper or chapter read and appreciated by a wide audience, adopted for courses, and hopefully cited by great authors in good journals — in short, when you want to ‘sell’ your writing to colleagues — titles can play a key role. It is obvious too that a title is how you ‘brand’ your text, how you attract readers.
In Focus - The American West, 150 Years Ago In the 1860s and 70s, photographer Timothy O'Sullivan created some of the best-known images in American History. After covering the U.S. Civil War, (many of his photos appear in this earlier series), O'Sullivan joined a number of expeditions organized by the federal government to help document the new frontiers in the American West. Double X Science - Science. It's the new black. Science Creative Quarterly The Freshperson Problem – Lingua Franca - Blogs Earlier this week, I had my copy-editor hat on and was working my way through a newsletter for a graduate program at the university. I was fixing typos, inserting and deleting commas (often for the sake of consistency), changing words to avoid repetition, and the like. Then at one point, I watched myself prescriptively cross out the phrase “freshman composition” and reword it as “first-year composition.” I have long been a supporter of nonsexist language reform, from using singular generic they to replacing –man words with nongendered alternatives. Research I’ve carried out over the past couple of years has revealed that many efforts to find nonsexist terms for professions, for example, have been strikingly successful. The term police officer now far surpasses policeman in frequency in the Corpus of Contemporary American English—and not just in writing but also in speech.
Tabs, writing and why writers should not carry portfolios I'm sending a box of Good Omens scents off to Terry Pratchett today. We have to vote on things like War (with or without ginger) and Shadwell (with or without condensed milk) and tell Beth at Black Phoenix Alchemy Labs what we think. If you put on a dab of War (with ginger) to see what it smells like on your skin, a large white dog will come and happily try and lick it off. (I liked reading the Tarts discussing the scents...) It is time for the closing of tabs:
Who are you writing for? 26 November 2013 by Jonathan O'Donnell Thanks to our sponsors, by Jonathan O’Donnell on Flickr Your grant application will probably only be read by half a dozen people who matter. Sure, you might get your colleagues to read it in draft. It might be reviewed by your local research whisperer. But they aren’t the people who matter! Edward Thomas’ “There’s Nothing Like the Sun”: The poet’s verse has the heightened perception of a great haiku Courtesy of Hulton Archive/Getty Images/Wikimedia Commons I came to “There’s Nothing Like the Sun,” and Edward Thomas’ work in general, quite late, thanks to some of my more inane prejudices. The image I’d developed of Thomas’ poems (without having read many of them) didn’t hold much appeal, not for somebody like me, who has lived in cities all his life.
Academic scattering 19 November 2013 by researchwhisper Katie Mack has been training as a cosmologist since about the age of 10 when she decided she wanted Stephen Hawking’s job. She got her bachelor’s in physics at Caltech, PhD in astrophysics at Princeton, did an STFC postdoctoral fellowship at Cambridge, and is now a DECRA postdoctoral researcher in theoretical astrophysics at the University of Melbourne. Her work focuses on finding new ways to learn about the early universe and fundamental physics using astronomical observations, probing the very building blocks of nature by examining the cosmos on the largest scales. Throughout her career, she has been working on the interface between astronomy and particle physics, studying dark matter, black holes, cosmic strings, and the formation of the first galaxies in the Universe.
Kean Birch: How to get published in academic journals Last week I spent a frustrating hour or two refereeing a paper for an academic journal – I say frustrating because the paper had a kernel of something really interesting buried inside a morass of wordiness and theory-ness. I actually came up with the term “theory-ridden” as a direct result of reading the paper. I don’t want to be mean about things here though. I’ve actually written about the need to be constructive in reviews – see here – and I think that the authors of this particular piece need encouragement not flagellation. My own, long experience of rejection – documented in this blog already – and other people’s calls for decency in refereeing – one example is Erik Schneiderhan’s piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education – mean that I don’t want to focus on the foibles of others.
Another look at Qualitative data analysis for Mac users: Dedoose Home > Uncategorized > Another look at Qualitative data analysis for Mac users: Dedoose Technically I’m not meant to be looking at data analysis right now: it’s writing month, and the last thing I need to be doing is getting lost in data. However, the Qualitative Data Analysis Software for Mac – A Brief Look post that I wrote last September is still getting a huge amount of traffic every day, and I thought it was time to write a quick update. What’s changed? Lots. I recently discovered a tool called Dedoose.
Designing conference posters » Colin Purrington A large-format poster is a big piece of paper or wall-mounted monitor featuring a short title, an introduction to your burning question, an overview of your novel experimental approach, your amazing results in graphical form, some insightful discussion of aforementioned results, a listing of previously published articles that are important to your research, and some brief acknowledgement of the tremendous assistance and financial support conned from others — if all text is kept to a minimum (less than a 1000 words), a person could fully read your poster in 5-10 minutes. Section content • DOs and DON’Ts • Adding pieces of flair • Presenting • Motivational advice • Software • Templates • Printing • Useful literature • Organizing a poster session What to put in each section Below, I’ve provided rough tips on how many words each of these sections might have, but those guesses are assuming you have a horizontal poster that is approximately 3×4′. Adjust accordingly.
Data Diving TIP OF THE ICEBERG: Independent reviewers of clinical trial data have access to just a minuscule percentage of the actual information.Pushart TIP OF THE ICEBERG: Independent reviewers of clinical trial data have access to just a minuscule percentage of the actual information. PUSHART A few weeks before Christmas 2009, the world was in the grip of a flu pandemic. More than 10,000 people had died, and roughly half a million people had been hospitalized worldwide; tens of millions had been infected.
Group blogs: BMJ The BMJ Today: If you hear hoof beats in Texas think of horses, not zebras As Saurabh Jha writes, “The likelihood that someone with cerebral aneurysm hit by a bat develops subarachnoid hemorrhage (near certainty) is not the same as the likelihood that someone who develops subarachnoid hemorrhage after high impact trauma has an aneurysm, hitherto undisclosed (very low).” But would you order tests so you could absolutely rule it out?