- One-Minute Writing Repairs
Writing guru, fledgling medical editor, former freshman comp teacher, and Edge blogger Rebecca Helton offers bite-sized tips to improve your writing. Small adjustments can make big differences in clarity and style. We've rounded up links to the related posts below:
Correcting ...
- Using Content-Lexical Ties To Connect Ideas in Writing
The following post was excerpted from How to Write an Essay Like an Equation: A Brief Guide to Writing like You’re Doing Math. Check out Rebecca Helton’s full review.
You may have been told that your writing doesn’t flow well, but were you taught what that meant? More importan...
- Three Tips for Writing to Non-Specialists
One evening, my professor for Dissertation Seminar randomly grouped us in pairs to discuss our dissertations. A student specializing in Literature became partnered with me, a specialist in Composition and Rhetoric.
“What’s your dissertation about?” I asked.
“Narrative historiog...
- Beginner’s Eye for the Science Guy (or Gal)
The beginner’s eye, not to be confused with Bette Davis eyes, is looking at things as if you’ve never seen them before. What if you reviewed your last several months’ worth of experiments as if you’ve never seen them before – no hypothesis, no preconceived notions, just a clean ...
- Big Words
My PhD mentor was a great guy, but like most of us he wasn’t perfect. What was his flaw? He liked to use big words. Depending on the audience, airing out the “big words” might be appropriate, but for the most part big words make for cumbersome and confusing writing. William Zinss...
- Making Writing More Memorable and Persuasive
In the last week, you’ve reviewed a couple hundred grant proposals. Or skimmed a couple hundred CVs and cover letters. Or graded a hundred papers. Which proposal will you advocate for? Which candidate will you pound the table to interview? Which student will you write an enthusia...
- The Scientist’s Adverb
In today’s class, we’re going to talk about the scientist’s adverb. I bet you didn’t know that scientists have an adverb all their own, so you’re no doubt thrilled that you stumbled upon this post.
Before I get too far, I sense some of you are struggling to remember the specific...
- How a Jail-house Letter and Goat Research Can Get Your Grant Funded
In FY2018, NIH received nearly 55,000 grant applications and funded just over 11,000, a 20% success rate. The NSF gets about 40,000 applications a year and also funds about 11,000. Many great research proposals are left unfunded each year.
To give your grant application its be...
- Paper-Writing Checklists To Prevent Headaches Down the Road
Avoid authorship headaches and streamline the path from data to paper with these checklists.
CRediT Taxonomy
Developed by a group of librarians, information scientists, and the director of the MIT Press, the CRediT Taxonomy allows authors to define precisely the contributions...
- One-Minute Writing Tuneup: Energize Your Words with Active Voice
Sentence after sentence in passive voice is wordy, invites errors such as dangling modifiers, and grates on readers' nerves. Use of active voice improves even science writing.
In active voice, a clearly stated subject performs the action of the sentence. In passive voice, the ...
