The Gunning-Fog index

Nature publishing group has a science blogroll with a bit of statistics for each blog, here is how it looks like for mine:

• Ranked 18 in science (377 overall)
• 2 post(s) per week (on average)
• 65 post(s) collected so far
• 7,032 words per post (on average)
• 14% complex words (on average)
• Readability by Flesch-Kincaid : best understood by university graduates
• Readability by Gunning-Fog : 146.0
• On 0 blogroll(s)
• 2 links to other science blogs
• 0 links from other science blogs

The first thing that crossed my mind was "what the hell this Gunning-Fog index is?". If you follow the link you get that "The Gunning-Fog index [...] is a rough estimate of the number of years of formal education that a person requires in order to understand the text on a first reading."

So, basically an average person needs to study for 146 years to get a rough idea what I'm writing about, while a well understandable text should have the index below 12. First I thought that this is due to appalling English I'm used to, but if you read further you'll see that there is nothing to do with that. The Gunning-Fox index comes from analysis of the average sentence length and the average number of syllables in words.

I never thought those indexes even exist. I promise, I promise to keep sentences shorter... )

Take care,

Misha

What to do with deleted sections?

When we write an article, we almost always have to omit some material, which has a lot of work behind it. There may be some restrictions to the article length, as in the case of letters to the editor. Also, a referee may ask to shorten appendices and skip insignificant details. An he/she will be right - a short paper is most likely to be read.

So, one usually has a choice: on the one hand an article should describe new and interesting results, without technical stuff interesting for 5% of readers or less. On the other hand, It might be a good idea to keep all the relevant material in the same place. This may be useful for further work of authors, or also for somebody else, who wants to learn from the paper or to work out something similar.

Recently there was a post by "How many deleted sections do you write?", where Daniel Lemire proposes a good idea what to do with deleted pages. Daniel suggests to put them in the article's supplementary material, with a reference in the article. In such a way, one can expect the article to be easily read with an access to all necessary details.

Another way might be to keep all the omitted material in the arXiv preprint, and cite it in the forthcoming paper.

Terence Tao

A 33 years old professor of math from University of California, 2006 Fields medal winner Terence Tao has a blog. It is extremely interesting as a whole, but here are some links to Terry's advices: Advices on career, On writing papers, Talk to your advisor, Take the initiative, and tons of references to older posts therein.

How to write consistently boring scientific literature

An excellent article about writing, which is accessible at Scribd (youtube for docs).

A Scandinavian professor has told me an interesting story. The first English manuscript prepared by one of his PhD students had been written in a personal style, slightly verbose but with a humoristic tone and thoughtful side-tracks. There was absolutely no chance, however, that it would meet the strict demands of brevity, clarity and impersonality of a standard article. With great difficulty, this student eventually learned the standard style of producing technical, boring and impersonal scientific writing, thus enabling him to write and defend his thesis successfully (Fig. 1).

"Work. Finish. Publish."

This was an advice of Michael Faraday to his younger colleague William Crookes. The second statement, "finish", is probably the most difficult part. Here it does not mean "stop collecting the experimental data", or "switch off the computer and do no extra calculations" (...since we have enough for a paper). It is really hard to came up with some closed-form investigation, with an exciting story you have nothing to add to. Most likely, if this is done, the third step, "to publish", needs only a bit of routine work...

Six rules for rewriting by Michael Nilsen

Very helpful post by one of the pioneers of quantum computation, Michael Nilsen. Here are the ideas which I find the most interesting:

1) Every sentence should grab the reader and propel them forward: Academics are wont to ignore this rule, believing the reader should be willing to endure any pain for a sufficient payoff. Of course, academics aren’t paid per reader. Good bloggers and journalists know better.

2) Use the strongest appropriate verb: Identify the verb in every sentence, and ask if you can improve it, perhaps eliminating adjectives and adverbs in the process. This is simple and mechanical, but often yields great improvements with little effort.

3) Beware of nominalization: A common way we weaken verbs is by turning them into nouns, and then combining them with weaker verbs. This bad habit is called nominalization. Contrast the wishy-washy “I conducted an investigation of rules for rewriting” with the more direct “I investigated rules for rewriting”. In the first sentence I have nominalized the strong verb “investigated” so that it becomes the noun “investigation”, and then combined it with the weaker verb “conducted”.

Probably we can generalize these rules as:

"Avoid the official, bureaucratic language in your articles. Surprisingly, science can be easily understood as an interesting story, without useless overcomplications."

Презентация о презентациях

Death by Powerpoint (and how to fight it) by Alexei Kapterev

Отличная критика того, что обычно показывается на семинарах и конференциях. Как обычно, правила очень просты, но большинство почему-то их игнорирует...

Unbreakable spaces

In the post How to make sure your paper will be rejected Daniel Lemire mentions that the paper will be definitely not accepted if "The authors have obviously never heard of unbreakable spaces." I absolutely agree with such a point, and always use a tilde in LaTeX when typing names, references, etc. However, such a rule is often violated by journals themselves. For instance, today I've got the authors' proofs of our article, accepted for publication in Jounal of Chemical Physics, where all my unbreakable spaces were broken. Afterwards I've had a look to recent articles in Physical Review and some other journals - their publishing staff also seems to be happy with breaking "Fig. 1" into two parts...

Writing papers

Here I provide a few links that I found interesting:

1) Write good papers by Daniel Lemire:

2) How to maximize citations by Peter Turney

3) Hints for New PhD students on How to Write Papers by Shahn Majid

I'm gratefut to Daniel for such a point:
"...A good abstract answers the question why should I read this paper?, it does not summarize the paper..."

Three brain rules to improve your presentations.

В принципе, это очевидные вещи, но далеко не все их соблюдают:

"1) Exercise - Making your body a lean, clean, aerobic machine, besides giving you time to think, ensures that your brain gets the oxygen it needs. It also gives you some empathy for the poor schlubs that must sit through your lecture, inert brains encased in a desk. Make their time worth it.

2) The 10 minute rule – Your audience fades after 10 minutes. If you have to lecture for 50 minutes, conscientiously change-up every 10 minutes or so. Turn on the lights, show a blank screen and tell a story, have your audience stand up and stretch, anything to reset the 10-minute boredom clock.

3) Pictures beat text – We remember a good image far longer than a string of text. During your talks, show images, speak words. If you need blocks of text for your talk, use handouts."

отсюда

On Being a Scientist: A Personal View

Классическая статья нобелевского лауреата по химии Джона Поляного:

"Science never gives up searching for truth, since it never claims to have achieved it.
.............................
Science, by contrast, is story-telling."