Guangjing Wang Ph.D. Candidate

Writing Notes

2022-09-26

The goal of good writing is straightforward: to make your reader’s job as easy as possible. The trick is not to copy someone else’s voice, but rather to study what works and what does not in your own writing and that of others to formulate your own guide to effective communication.

In the art of writing science article, the author discusses some of the rules he has picked up for tackling each of these elements.

Word

  • Jargon is one of the greatest enemies of clear scientific writing.

  • Do not invent new words or phrases if there is already a commonly used word or phrase that accurately fits the bill.

  • If at all possible, avoid using abbreviations.

  • Word choice also impacts the precision of your writing. For example, “these data show” is less precise than “these data indicate” or “these data demonstrate”; although “show” can denote both “indicate” or “demonstrate,” the two words are not interchangeable as the former is synonymous with “suggest” and the latter with “prove”. Using the word “show” thus forces your readers to pause, break their stream of consciousness, and waste effort deciding what you meant.

Sentence

  • Passive language, although extremely common in scientific writing, is a bore that your readers’ eyes will tend to glide over without taking in.

  • Be aware of long sentences. While it is good to vary your sentence length across a paragraph, longer sentences are generally harder to parse than their shorter brethren.

Paragraph

  • The first sentence of each paragraph should tell the reader what you expect them to get out of the paragraph that follows, which makes their job of following it far easier.

  • The first sentence of a paragraph generally should not refer to an idea in the paragraph above without, at the least, restating that idea. For this reason, I avoid starting paragraphs with phrases such as “However”, or “In contrast”.

  • A paragraph should discuss only a single idea and thus should have a single, unifying theme running throughout it.

  • Flow is an equally critical element of a good paragraph structure: every sentence in a paragraph should arise logically from the sentence before it, and transition logically into the sentence that follows.

  • A scientific paper is composed of specific elements: a title, an abstract, an introduction, methods, results, figures and captions, and, often, a stand‐alone discussion section.

  • Figure caption should be clear. I believe that the reader should be able to ascertain the entire story just by reading the figure captions. The first sentence of the figure caption should be, in effect, a title for the figure that clearly and concisely tells your readers what you expect them to learn from the figure.

Email

Thank you for the patience and valuable instructions!
With the continuation with previous mail, In the past two weeks, I have gone though multiple data sources including Factiva, Bloomberg, Reuters, analyst reports, industry reports and local news outlets looking for important updates on this topic.
There are multiple interesting aspects that I looked into…
Please find the updated attached excel sheet which contains all the information collected as instructed in your request. Also, In the spreadsheet attached, I have included the keywords and link for each news source, highlighted the cells for the newly added records for the period between 24 Dec- 31 Jan 2022.
Please do let me know your valuable advise on the shared excel sheet. Please don’t hesitate to contact me if you have any questions.

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