Writing scientific papers is rather like writing poetry in an ancient verse form. Everything you want to say has to be forced into predetermined sections: introduction, method, results, discussion. You must never say “I,” and the passive tense is preferred. Inevitably all the interesting things get left out.
Citation Obsession? Get Over It!
Bibliographic citation has apparently eclipsed perfect grammar and the five-paragraph theme as the preoccupation of persnickety professors.
What a colossal waste. Citation style remains the most arbitrary, formulaic, and prescriptive element of academic writing taught in American high schools and colleges. Now a sacred academic shibboleth, citation persists despite the incredibly high cost-benefit ratio of trying to teach students something they (and we should also) recognize as relatively useless to them as developing writers.
—Kurt Schick
Study: why bother to remember when you can just use Google?
In the age of Google and Wikipedia, an almost unlimited amount of information is available at our fingertips, and with the rise of smartphones, many of us have nonstop access. The potential to find almost any piece of information in seconds is beneficial, but is this ability actually negatively impacting our memory?
» via ars technica
Curious, isn’t it, that almost 2400 years ago, Socrates had precisely the same fear about the new technology of his time — writing:
“This discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.” — Plato, The Phaedrus
Source: infoneer-pulse
Why are syllabi so badly written?
The federal government requires corporations to write their disclosure statements to the SEC in “Plain English.” Now if only we could get college teachers and administrators to apply the same principles to writing syllabi.
The Cult of Dullness
“It was as a candidate for the Ph.D. at Harvard that I first encountered the Cult of Dullness. Since boyhood I had aspired to be a writer. So with my first graduate research paper I tried to write as well as I could. My professor warned me gently that although he himself did not object to a well-written paper, his colleagues might be put off. They might suspect that I was not really committed to dull writing and thus not a suitable candidate for the Ph.D.
“I encountered the problem again when I sent my doctoral dissertation to a typist to have it type up for presentation to my readers, who would approve or disapprove it. The typist called shortly to express her concern. It did not read like a Ph.D. Was I sure it would be acceptable? What was the problem, I asked. Well, she was enjoying reading it, and that made her uneasy on my account. She was concerned that it might not be accepted. It was not as dull as she felt it ought to be.
“The Cult of Dullness not only survives; it flourishes.”
(Ziolkowski, 1990, in Hinchey & Kimmel, 2000, p. 92.)
Hinchey, P.H., & Kimmel, I. (2000). The graduate grind: a critical look at graduate education. New York: Taylor and Francis. http://books.google.com/books?id=fm0iG0OCsYQC
