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I highly value humor and love to entertain whenever I can. In formal writing, I would encourage you to go ahead and write something that you think would be funny. Then reread it. Then reread it again. Read it aloud. Read it silently. Read it again tomorrow while you edit it. And read it again. And again. And again. Imagine reading it out loud to the people ...
167
There's nothing wrong with long words. The real issue with your writing is that it is redundant.
"these related works are germane to our present discussion."
In this sentence, "germane" just stands for "related", so you're effectively saying "these related works are related". Here you are using the English cliche of ...
122
This is an entirely reasonable request and you should honour it. It is very easy to write English in a manner that avoids the unfortunate use of 'he' as a placeholder for either gender, and doing so avoids needless sexism in your writing.
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Thou shalt not dumb down thy writing, but don't make it a vain exercise of style
I'm a non-native English speaker, and let me put it straight: I may write in simple English, because limited are my English writing skills, but I don't want to read simple English because I want to enrich my vocabulary and grammatical constructions.
But whether you write for ...
111
I believe it's only appropriate in the type of writing where you are in a position to give the reader excercises. That is, in course books or other learning material. There, I think it's fine, assuming you've already given enough information for them to be able to perform such an excercise.
In papers or theses, you're actually trying to convince the reader ...
answered May 1 '14 at 13:33
Angew is no longer proud of SO
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105
Many writers make very effective use of humor in their writing, and this extends to technical and scientific writing as well. Donald Knuth is one author I can think of who does this extremely well, which is one of the many things that makes his books memorable and enjoyable to read. So I think there is definitely room for some small self-deprecating remarks ...
102
Yes, you need to be able to write to be successful in academia, as in many things.
But it is a skill that can be learned. You can take courses and you can practice. And, as with most learning, practice with feedback is the path. It isn't a short path, necessarily, but it is one that you can follow.
Actually, there are courses in both creative writing and ...
98
Certainly there are many people in the world who prefer to avoid using gendered pronouns for persons of unspecified gender, so your co-authors' view is not particularly unusual. But there are others who see no problem with this. There are plausible arguments on both sides, and this site is not the place to rehash them. You can see some of the debate on ...
97
I've run into variations of this a lot in economics, and have a few observations.
Being good at research in your field is an entirely separate skill from being able to communicate ideas clearly. Two Nobel laureates really embody the extremes here for me, both with brilliant research. One the one side is Paul Krugman, who, regardless of what you think of ...
90
If you're quoting someone, quote them as they said it. We're all adults. In the literature world, we quote swear words and other potentially offensive things all the time and no one bats an eye. I've no doubt other fields are the same.
Personally, if I saw an asterisk or similar, I would presume you interviewed them via chat or email, and they actually self-...
86
It's not worth it. Few waste time trying to unblind their reviewers to take retribution for bad reviews. It's just not worth it. The average journal submitter doesn't have enough power to do damage to a random reviewer.
If you need a strategy, trying passing your text through Google Translate to Spanish and back to English. It'll probably be garbage ...
81
Mathematical papers, especially, and many others, are not written for the complete novice with no understanding of the field. One tries to tailor the explanation of a new concept to the general level of understanding of the audience and tries to avoid being overly pedantic giving every detail and argument back to Euclid.
College lecturers often use such ...
77
Let it go, while the typo is limited to emails. Emails are frequently written hastily and certain typos can be common or made on purpose to type less, or even for fun (I do sometimes this in my language, to mimic certain dialectal expressions).
If, instead, the typo appears in, for instance, a paper or other public document you're jointly writing, then ...
74
This is, unfortunately, a case where English grammar can be tricky and exactly how you phrase things is going to matter.
It is often seen a presumptuous to name something after yourself: "Newton's Laws" and "Hawking radiation" and "Rayleigh scattering" are retrospective judgements of significance by the community. Claiming a similar name is an assertion in ...
73
No, this is absolutely not just your problem! I am also an ESL and this very comment has been given to me numerous times: Your writing is weird, but I can't really tell how. After many years of working on it (including reading many books about writing, joining a writing group, publishing some papers, and writing pretty much everyday), my writing is still, ...
70
Assuming that you really want to do this, here are some strategies that should not strongly diminish the readability of your review:
If you are from an English-speaking country: Use the spelling conventions of another English-speaking country (e.g., British instead of American English).
Switch to a strongly different punctuation convention, e.g., the French ...
69
When I wrote a biography of myself, it was because someone in administration asked me to so they could put it into a prospectus, where there would be lots of biographies in a row all in the same editorial voice.
It was specifically required to be in the third person for that reason: all the profiles are presented as though they have been written by the ...
68
If I understand correctly, you are supposed to be evaluating the work and/or ideas of some other academic or writer. You are wondering whether it will be funny and/or more efficient to, in lieu of a more careful explanation of the limitations of that person's work, dismiss them by calling them a (standard, even cliched) name.
This is not a good use of ...
66
My experience has typically been that the more formal mode, with no contractions, is preferred for most scientific publications. It is not a terribly strong or important custom, however, and in one of my more high-profile multi-disciplinary publications, I actually found the copyeditor introducing contractions into my writing!
In short: worth mentioning, ...
65
Several times during seminars I heard the following exchange, which sounds like a joke but actually isn't:
Audience member: Why is X true?
Speaker: Oh, it's obvious.
Audience member: OK, thanks! [sits down satisfied]
Especially in mathematics, it is often helpful to let the Reader know what level of difficulty and/or complexity each step is. The approach ...
64
As an author, you can choose different styles for abstracts. As far as I know, the most interesting and shortest abstract ever was written in this paper, Can apparent superluminal neutrino speeds be explained as a quantum weak measurement? by M V Berry, N Brunner, S Popescu and P Shukla.
Abstract
Probably not.
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The rule is:
Never use an uncommon word where a common word can do the job just as well.
This is to make it easier to read your work.
You said
My intention is merely for the writing to be conversational
However, "Germane," "Scenario," and "Diametrically" are not words used in conversation. Words like these will immediately ...
answered Sep 6 '20 at 1:10
Anonymous Physicist
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61
hey. i was wondering of your students write like this
Alas, yes, they do (however, I'm a non-native English speaker who teaches international students whose level of English is extremely varied, and there's not much I can do about grammar).
Anyway, during the first lesson I give the following pieces of advice (which are frequently ignored, though):
Sender ...
answered Sep 27 '15 at 18:31
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The purpose of an overview paragraph and a table of contents are different:
The table of contents serves to quickly find a specific section of a document so you can start reading there or extract a specific information. This is something that rarely makes sense with most papers, except if you start at the conclusion/discussion, which is however easy to find ...
57
This is a common issue when inexperienced people write their first papers. It's tempting to write down everything that went into your personal understanding of a subject, rather than just starting from what's known and focusing on the new things you did.
Imagine if you looked up a recipe for a pie and the first 80% of it detailed the history of wheat ...
57
If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter.
What you are proposing is way more difficult than avoiding, detecting and correcting grammar and reference mistakes. Proof-reading is important but it is the easiest step of writing a paper.
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Yes, it's normal. Homeworks and exams are written to prove that the writer has certain skills; papers are written to prove something new. The reader's skills are not under question, so a different style of writing is appropriate. Also, journals used to have stricter page limits than they do now, so there was quite some pressure to be terse. Conversely, ...
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There is an annoying truth here: What's OK in a PhD thesis and what not largely depends on the reviewers. Some people in academia have a huge inflated ego and prefer things to be done as they suggest, and the reviewer in your case is possibly among those people. You don't want to fight with them on this kind of issue.
If the reviewer has other comments that ...
55
This isn't something that is decided based on objective measures - it's a statement of the author's opinion that history has shown the paper to be very important.
If you, in your professional opinion, believe that the paper has had a major influence on an area of research, for a considerable period of time, then you could call it "classic". If you don't ...
55
The abbreviation iff is generally understood in several fields outside logic, and in my experience it is well understood by physicists, but the golden rule is to define every abbreviation at its first use and/or provide a list of abbreviations. In this way, even those not familiar with an abbreviation will be able to understand the text.
However, in general, ...
answered Dec 27 '20 at 15:10
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