Judy Swan, Scientific Writing: Beyond Tips and Tricks
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- Опубликовано: 18 май 2024
- PCR Seminar with Judy Swan: "Scientific Writing: Beyond Tips & Tricks"
In order to write clearly, we must understand how we read. In this workshop, we learned how to align with readers' expectations with Judy Swan, world-famous science writer and 2013 TEDxCMU speaker.
Lecture Documents: www.cmu.edu/student-org/pcr/me... 
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An awesome workshop. My takeaways are:
1. Scientist are defacto teachers of writing
2. Professors don't have a language for speaking about their expertise
3. Write from the readers' perspective
4. Reading scientific articles takes energy
5. Readers focus on sentence structure before substance
6. Emphasis
7. Structure helps the writer/reader see things
8. Readers change their mind, data do not change
9. The rule of writing scientific papers is "No Rules"
10. Determine what your facts are (from your data) and then speak for them
11. No neutral sentence, you must choose a side
Thank you, Judy Swan.
Great synopsis. For #5, I would say that readers focus on presentation/structure before content.
Thank you!
Wow thank you so much
thank you, abdullah i. - I keep revisiting this presentation and learn something new every time: this time your takeaways! Most appreciated.
Thank you Abdullah, your list is helpful 👍🏼
Although, most of the time, I write in a way that blurry's the things that I want to say; I may not be qualified to stand in the same grounds of professionals as sophisticated as her, much less to judge how great she delivers her lectures, which is blatantly obvious and need not be mentioned, but because I've had the luxury of watching this lecture on RUclips, extracting some new information that is so valuable, it's equivalent to a purse of gold, I, for one, at the very least, as a token of my deepest appreciation, have to say that this lecture is truly enlightening. Really. I thank, most especially, Mrs. Judy Swan and all the people who made this possible. I felt like I owed all of them a comment, and here it is.
Absolutely loved this. Brought things to light that I have never noticed before!
Just wonderful presentation! Thank you!
This workshop was excellent, but, I wish I could have seen the full handout from the lecture, and also heard the comments from the audience.
Now here's a re-write. Although I didn't have access to the full handout, this workshop was excellent. :).
This is a great lecture! Congratulations!
This whole talk has a high level of information and experience packed into one and a half hours of time. For learners and academician, this is a must watch like. Thanks, Judy Swan and organizers for this... Best Regards.
Thank you for this amazing, amazing content!!!
Great presentation! I learned a lot.
What a fantastic lecturer she is, so engaging definitely not one of those who like to hear themselves talk.
This is such a useful and practical presentation for a scientific writer, especially grad students. Thank you.
Judy Swan is a good teacher. I took her writing workshop when I was in NJ.
Thank you Prof. Judy Swan! Great content!
I decided to study Accounting because I work better with numbers, than with language. However, I feel that this presentation has opened up a door of possibilities for my understanding of language and better communication skills. So glad you recorded this for the public. (And, yes, the benefits would have been doubled, if all of the student's responses would have been heard, repeated, or presented in some way.) Thank you so very much!!!
Although the last 25 minutes were not much use as the audience could not be heard, and Judy did not repeat what they said for the mic, the first hour was very informative and well worth listening to for anyone who writes reports of all natures.
Agree, maybe they can provide subtitles for the audience inputs.
nice structure! :D
I see you have learned
Let me try making it more positive:
Although the last 25 minutes were not much use as the audience could not be heard, and Judy did not repeat what they said for the mic, for anyone who writes reports of all natures the first hour was very informative and well worth listening to.
@@giocaliguia8370The structure you use is much more complicated than what the original poster uses. Yours has three subordinate clauses before the main clause and thus requires the reader to keep much more information in the working memory. Keeping so many details in the working memory is hard, but it can be trained.
When I first started reading scientific papers in 2020, I couldn't keep all the information in my working memory till I reached the main clause, but little by little, you can train your working memory to chunk the information. Subordinate clause + main clause or main clause + subordinate clause is what I recommend using. If the structure were to get a lot more complicated than that, it makes sense to divide the thought into multiple sentences rather than saying it all in a single, highly complex sentence.
Edit: your and OP's message follow similar structures, but yours has one more subordinate clause before the main clause.
This was an invaluable presentation. Thank you!
Very good video, very helpful, delicately presented and fun. Thank you.
Fantastic lecturer! Thanks a lot.
Although I dropped out of school twice, this magnificent lecture by Judy Swan has inspired me to reapply to NYU. I hope I can find professors who are willing to use my time as wisely as she did.
In the nature of the lecture, I will give you a thumbs up.
This is good despite the little hiss. I will recommend.
thanks for sharing this. I love it.
this is unbelievably exciting!
Thank you very much for sharing this. Very useful.
The same stuff I'm teaching to my Ielts students.
Your work always has to be logical in terms of structure, the way your ideas are presented, the number of arguments in each Body paragraph.
Our job is to write smoothly and not let anything break this flow.
You might want to watch this ruclips.net/video/T1pA2TFEIkU/видео.html
SCIENTIFIC WRITINGS _ Never i was able to thinking of it before. How many of Researchers team to participate in such responsabillity, often during of tireless years inside of Lab. CONGRATULATIONS TO YOU !
excellent lecture! I watched it many times.
To understand the concepts presented here, explore the concepts of recency effect (people tend to remember the last part of information), the primacy effect (they recall the first information strongly), and recall the information in between at much smaller rates.
Excellent presentation. I really learnt a lot....... Thank very much Judy Swan
Wow! Thanks, Professor!
Great. I learnt alot. Thank you.
this is fantastic!
I enjoy watching it again and again :)
Thank you for uploading such valuable lecture., Admin. Pls more videos.
Just beautiful 💎
She is really good
Excellent presentation. I agree with Eric, I wished that someone had repeated the comments or if someone had passed around a microphone.
Video starts at 12:21
This is a great lecture! Congratulations!. Very good video, very helpful, delicately presented and fun. Thank you..
This is the purpose of higher education. To teach people how to do something that's applicable in the real world.
This is an amazing it will help me to in my examination
This is gold
So fast for a brazilian professor but still a wonderful speech. Excelent job.
Really a lot of information for a researcher.We have to appreciate the presentation in making the reader to understsnd the influence of text in the main clause .Once you keep following the text upto 10 minutes then you will keep watching till end.A must watch video to every researcher .
Brilliant presentation. I am using your print-out and argument to convince my teenage students that grammar is central to success. Your points can be used to point out why teaching the 112 sentence patterns and clause structures is our first step to teach our elementary students to think and communicate clearly .. Thank you for making it available to the public.
The lecture printout link is no longer active. Sounds like you got it before the link broke. Is a copy online anywhere?
@@MichaelDiamondMusic tried to send but doesn’t seem to allow share. Any other way I should try? Unfortunately I never downloaded it.
Just search "Judy Swan Handout" or check here techcomm1.files.wordpress.com/2014/08/swan_handout.pdf@@MichaelDiamondMusic
Dawkins and Pinker should be the idol of every academic writer. I have come across many lectures like the lady above but Pinker and Dawkins' writing is absolutely marvellous.
Ok. This is good !
Fred really is a nice guy.
This was a really cool lecture. Thank you.
15:00 Do you think, perhaps, that the reader does both of these processes simultaneously?
All of fact come from rearranging,collecting,practising,acknowlaging and implementing as is to researcher.
Wave particle duality of words and structure.
Did anybody else notice the murmur underneath her breath at 9:40 when she loss herself on some side storry and said 'how did this get there' haha I love her already
The document linked is missing. Can someone please provide the document mentioned in the lecture?
Here, it's the pdf: techcomm1.files.wordpress.com/2014/08/swan_handout.pdf
I found writing a scientific paper is very challenging and I wounder if a proof reading can be available for free.
Great lecture! How can we get handout documents. The links seems is not working
Here, it's the pdf: techcomm1.files.wordpress.com/2014/08/swan_handout.pdf
The lecture documents link is no longer active. Is it possible to get a copy?
Amazing talk and content!
Here, it's the pdf: techcomm1.files.wordpress.com/2014/08/swan_handout.pdf
@@juanchavarro1946 Thank you very much!
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Use your mind, do not rely on other people. Otherwise, what is the point in doing research?
Marketing, Marketing, Marketing.
"The main difference as we don't write a single author papers". No.
The main difference between real scientists (in the STEM fields) and humanities and economics writers lies in that the writers in the STEM fields first have to generate the subject of their writing (unless they write secondary literature like reviews, book chapters or monographs). That is the biggest difference.
I have published a single author paper in a Tier 1 Chemistry journal, Chemical Science. It is possible. The reason it is not done is not about the writing, it is because the way research enterprise is structured, the division of labour. It is very rare to find a single person driving all that goes into producing of a scientific publication, as it happened to me for that work. It is also very common one person - usually the PI save for the few "superstars" who have been bestowed the luxury of having salaried deputies that are sufficiently experienced to handle it - actually does the writing, the other authors have worked on generating the subject that is being written about. So de facto that is again a single-author paper as far as the paper proper is concerned.
That is an incredibly ignorant statement. Scholars in the social sciences and humanities generate the subject of their writing as well.
@@williamclark9973 Oh wow, such a great refutation, one that is as knowledgeable and wise as it is long and detailed.
Anyone who has tried to publish a paper in the STEM fields knows that there is the fundamental requirement for novelty. In STEM fields you can make a new chemical compound or material only once, formulate a law of physics only once, run a computational model at certain level of sophistication and theory on a specific system or process only once (unless there is a simultaneous and independent effort, it happens more often than people realize). Every new paper must add something new to the body of knowledge on the subject. And you must throughly disclose previous works that may threaten your claim of novelty. This is one of the most important things peer referees and editors watch out for. This is nowhere more clearly illustrated than in my own discipline of chemistry, where pretty much every synthetic paper describes compositions of matter which have never existed before in the real world, and sometimes even the researchers could not envision beforehand.
Excuse me, but I do not see how disciplies (I do not call them sciences because they are not) such as economics, sociology, antropology and the like can match that. All of the above regularly offer descriptive and analytical writings on what has already been produced, in a most general sense, by humans at large. Clearly, I do not make this argument about artists, because the topic of the video is "researchers", which artists are not. The most sophisticated of humanitarian researchers run powerful statistical models on large datasets, and that's it. The datasets as a rule come from the "real world", because grant agencies would not finance works of some made up data of no societal relevance.
The single author is an unintended consequence of that, because a single person could offer their thoughts a humanitarian topic in writing. The STEM fields need multiple authors because often one project involves the independent expertise of multiple researchers, and/or the labour is so demanding it would be impossible for a single person to carry it out in a reasonable time frame (grants and tenures are competitve, after all, and speed is of essence. The boss wants the manuscript submitted last month, etc etc.).
The difference is that the humanitarian disciplines cannot run proper experiments. Here is an example. Economists want to study effect of interest rates on economy. A true experiment would be to create a few replicas of the human society that are isolated from each other and unaware they are being experimented on. Then the researcher like a deus-ex-machina sets the interest rate and watches how the economy responds. It is plain obvious that actual economics researchers we have today absolutely cannot do that.
I’d drop that class if I had to look at those chalkboards like that.
it is worthy to watch the first one-hour part. but not last 20 minutes.
Does anyone have the link to the handout?
9:43
12:20
14:16
16:29
17:56
shame the document is no longer there
Evening everybody I need a help with my first scientific study writing. Topic is PLANNING A SCIENTIFIC STUDY so what should I write about . about how to write a scientific study? Or not
The document in the link above is not accessible
The signboard is my brain 🌩️
So scientific
Sorry Professor, no documents are available in the link...!!!
Search "Judy Swan Handout" or check it here techcomm1.files.wordpress.com/2014/08/swan_handout.pdf
I wonder how much this depends on culture. Do these tips apply only to English native speakers or also to other languages?
German for example?
@@kokokuvat5310 Exactly. I am a native speaker of German and continuously struggle with my English co-authors about the proper phrasing of such sentences.
Para mi es interesante, although creo que la aplicación al castellano se dificulta
In the example: "Fred is a nice guy, but he beats his dog"-- aren't the both main clauses? This is a complex sentence-- where both are full sentences with a coordinating conjunction (but)
what is the deal with the chalkboard for a presentation?? barely has contrast.
I write research papers in core engineering
I'm looking up how to wash chalk off a blackboard next. 😶
@1:10 💯
Sachin Dev
23:38 👍
Good
why can't someone clean that blackboard?
The best trick to write fluid is drinking 1 coffee whitout sugar whitout milk, and then all is functioning properly.
Look at that messy blackboard!
look at that content
Writers “film”.
Judy's presentation would benefit from an edited side screen listing content and context points for the viewer to track and write notes.
could someone please give me the handout
TheMinstrel55 Link in the description chief 👍🏻
The dog bit fred!
At 22:25 she bludgeons us.
As professors we were required to arrive 30 minutes early to wash our own boards... with bucket and sponge... Different culture of professors today...
manual labor is for poor people who don't have degrees.
If anyone here thinks that they will watch couple of videos or take a small course and they will turn into great writers......forget it. It takes years to hone in a set of skills that makes you a good writer. Your old habits derail you on a consistent basis. It takes years and some supervision or help from those who are not afraid to criticize you before you get better.
Very good, but there is a sound like a hiss that made me give up watching in the middle.
scientific writing starts with a clean board
Somebody needs to act up in class so teacher can get her blackboard cleaned! ;-)
14:00 Great statement of thermodynamics. But it's just one context. The other context is Shannon's theorem: that you can achieve the channel limit, under any error model. Intuition derived from the mature field of thermodynamics could be the reason that Shannon's law resisted formulation for as long as it did. No-one anticipated asymptotic perfection in the general case, and near-asymptotic behaviour at practical scale. (One word bad, one hundred words good.)
Meaning resides not so much in dictionary word-space as in some kind of cognitive vector space. Based on the reader's interpretation of the words (with plenty of idiosyncratic thermal error), the reader slowly assembles a composite vector of the author's intent. Typically this vector is riddled with self-contradiction (introduced by the idiosyncratic reading process) and can't be a viable cognitive vector. So then you have to rack your brain and try to find a candidate vector (or few) that _are_ viable cognitive vectors, and assess which ones have the least angle to what you presumed on reading alone. Ideally, you then calculate the error term, and go back over the text you are reading to see which readings made the largest contribution to the (proposed) error term, and whether that isn't due to idiosyncrasy, rather than solid grokage. (We also, through this process, constantly work to deflate our own idiosyncrasies.) This is the hard, back-and-forth convergence algorithm of deep reading. (Often the writer also fails to put forward a consistent cognitive vector, which further complicates matters; or the writer was putting forward two related ideas, which you mistook as a second exposition of one idea.)
And I've actually over-simplified this horrifically, because "viable" stands for a level of culturally _acceptable_ inconsistency. At the hard end, physicists routinely overlook inconsistency between quantum mechanics and gravity, because there is no established consistency to demand otherwise. And then in astronomy, there's always some wiggle room around the distance candles, etc. By the time you get to anthropology, there's wiggle room in all directions. Maybe that's what Pauli partially meant by "not even wrong": when a proposal is not even self-consistent enough to legitimately map onto acceptable, above-board inconsistency, to even begin thinking systematically about the many problematic details. Implicitly, in Pauli's formulation, being "wrong" at least lies on the long, hard slog to salvation: you've at least done enough to successfully prime the error-correction pump into the convergent zone.
The best writers often have a small nucleus of terms which they apply extremely carefully and extremely precisely. In terms of Sagan's _Contact,_ this is the reader's "primer" to prime the error resolution algorithm in vector space (without injecting clever algebra to provide some superstructure, optimal Shannon codes quickly become computationally intractable). Presumable, if you can crack the nucleus of most careful language, you can probably make inroads on the next orbital shell (with increasingly more electrons, of increasingly cloudlike nature).
What Judy is trying to say here is that accuracy in word usage along is merely a bootstrap, and in no ways subsumes the hard work of resolving the text to its final destination. The final destination is liable to resolve into a small disk of uniform probability, beyond which further reading will no longer help you resolve. One can think of this small disk as the standard cross-entropy of communicating at cross purposes. Kahneman and Tversky had a notoriously small disk of cross-entropy of communicating at cross purposes in their shared research domain (not so much in their emotional communication). Their disk of mutual incomprehension was so small and atypical, it caused them immense headaches in flipping coins (or revolving doors) to establish first authorship on any given paper.
In the normal world, that small disk is highly valued within academia, because it's what allows credit to flow as credit must flow; otherwise, you'd have these amazing idea twins all the time, and you'd never know which one to tenure, and which to one to academically spurn. Telepathically conjoined geniuses would simply _never_ survive a plagiarism review. So don't go around wishing for language to be _too_ precise in moving thoughts from one mind to another, as it would hopelessly upset the established order of things.
No handout 😭
Judy how do I get in contact with you for further discussions.
For a negative for the 3rd sentence, I'd say - None of the four publications produced I the last funding period focus on the the specific aims in the previous proposal.
V bad
DJ Henrique e boa tarde para todos nós estamos em em frente do mercado e um beijo no rosto do coração e boa
I had to try it: inserting "genocide" between subject and verb, and then further burying it by every other available means.
_Always a game rooster, Bob, who had once supported genocide, back in the old days (but only for a little while), dropped to his knees in his Sunday best and prodded gently under his prized rose bush to extract an errant football for the boisterous children of the newly arrived immigrant family next door; pausing momentarily, almost imperceptibly, at grass level-as he probed to obtain a sufficiently secure overhand snout-grip on the dewy cone-to thank the Lord for the special soil nutrient which enticed his roses to bloom most rapturously._
Say what you will about Bob, he's a game rooster.
In order to write clearly, we must... wash those chalkboards! Good grief.
LOL I was thinking exactly the same!
2018
Any passionate academic educator will tell you that chalk board is absolutely unacceptable.
First thing I thought, too. Christ almighty.
It does distract from her lecture.
As you are a teacher = here is a correction. At a CORONATION you are CROWNED. there is no such word as "coronated"
12:58 It's almost impossible for me to sit still in my chair while Judy holds up academic journals as the holy grail of effective communication. Steven Pinker has been pretty loud recently in proclaiming that even he doesn't understand what his colleagues are saying much of the time-and he _is_ the prototypical expert reader within his own niche. One of the _major_ reasons graduate students don't have a better grasp of writing politics for journals is that the discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of journal prose (and there are many, many weaknesses) is not robustly discussed. The text is often compressed until _only_ an insider can fully decode its implications.
What kind of a writing standard is that? There are _many_ journal articles where 25% less compression would expand the competent audience by 800% (that's my own feeling about this). Often it's just a long-cultivated norm to aid the in-group in publicly glossing over their warts: keep compressing your language until your internal laundry can only be fully witnessed by people privy to an opaque, professional code.
It's a difficult writing process-for legitimate reasons-wrapped inside some ugly political machinery, supported by an omerta academic culture (supposing you hope to be promoted ever again), where the omerta culture doesn't have a clear dividing line between the the legitimate technical challenges and the legacy political hindrances, so the one domain rubs off on the other, and both suffer.
Part of the reason that so much of the text is bad is that if you supply clean, efficient writing around every technical point, and then resort to thick, terrible language around all the political laundry, it really calls itself out for what it is. Better that the blended mayonnaise-kale is consistent throughout. It's a high diplomatic art to sufficiently conceal the laundry under clean diction (which is why a _few_ academic writers manage to become known for the clarity of their prose-but the secret here is the gifted application of hand-crafted mayonnaise, a time-consuming artisan hobby that only a select few type-A Heston Blumenthals bother to fully perfect).
If we had an objective standard for assessing academic journals (suppose machine learning continues to improve at its current pace for another fifty years), I would hazard a guess that present day academic writing would be judged as 10-20% as efficient and effective as it could be, if we were really making the effort (and less subservient to the hindrances of academic glory).
By no means in such a world would the current standard of insider-privileged journal compression be allowed to live.
I am not sure if I understand anything that you have said !
لن اصبر لابناء زناء يسحبونا للمستشفيات قال ألله تعالى(مَن كَانَ يُرِيدُ الْحَيَاةَ الدُّنْيَا وَزِينَتَهَا نُوَفِّ إِلَيْهِمْ أَعْمَالَهُمْ فِيهَا وَهُمْ فِيهَا لَا يُبْخَسُونَ)يألله لَا تَبْخَسُ .
as one with OCD, the fact that she wrote, 1. 2. 3) 4) 5) is undesirable. Plot twist, Fred beat his dog in a race, not physically beat the dog.
Elizabeth Holmes must have taken this seminar :-)
i do not understand this