- Reviewers & Editors Share the Secret Sauce
Publishing Your Medical Research, 2nd Edition reveals the secret sauce for maximizing the palatability of your manuscript submissions.
Edge reviews have featured exceptional books about the mechanics, inspiration, process, and editing of writing. What differentiates this offer...
- One-Minute Writing Tuneup: Don’t Dangle Your Modifiers Off a Cliff
Modifiers add description, context, and pizzaz to nouns, verbs, and other parts of a sentence. As well as the adjectives and adverbs you're probably familiar with, verbal phrases function as modifiers too. Verbal phrases take a verb and make it function as a noun, adjective, or a...
- You MUST Read Dreyer’s English
If Strunk and White is a subtle and respectable Merlot, Dreyer’s English is a Cosmopolitan: light, witty, and slightly pink. Reading this style guide is like going to party with your snarky friend to critique everyone from the bar. Dreyer makes you feel like part of the in-cr...
- One-Minute Writing Tuneup: Comprise vs. Compose
“Comprised of” should never exist in formal writing. Arguably, the construction is used so much now that sooner or later, style guides will accept it, but not yet.
First, some background. Per the Cambridge Dictionary, Comprise means “to consist of or to be made up of”; i.e., it...
- One-Minute Writing Tuneup: Correcting Comparisons
A rule to instantly improve your writing: "Compared to" (or "compared with") never replaces "than" without a sentence rewrite.
This construct is common in academic work, and misuse is understandable. Often the sentence does make a comparison. However, using "compared to" in plac...
- Getting Your Ducks in a Row for that First Big Grant Submission
So you are sailing high with your K career development award ready to pounce on your next grant submission! But what do you need to reach that next milestone, i.e. “independent” funding such as a R01—the currency of academic medical research? Well, you better start thinking abo...
- Publishing Null Results
Nearly every scientist has felt the frustration of pouring effort, money and (sometimes) tears into a project only to get null results. The elusive p<0.05 decides whether results get published or not—the oft-mentioned file drawer problem. Others have explained better than I ca...
- How to Review a Paper
Reviewing regularly, even early in your career, lets you stay ahead of the curve of the literature. Close analysis of a paper benefits your writing as you see examples that do or don’t lead the reader down a logical path to a conclusion, clearly explain the significance of the w...
- Research Manuscripts Should Tell Really Good Stories
Book Review: The Art of Scientific Storytelling by Rafael E. Luna, PhD
Chapter 1: Introduction
Skim or skip. This section promotes the book and the promising ideas it conveys, when many of us (me, me, me) just want to get to the meat of the book. After several pages it reads ...
- Tips for Conquering the Literature
As a new graduate student, I struggled with identifying the most relevant papers, organizing interesting publications, and remembering why I flagged an article as “Super Important!!!” months after I read it. I’ve synthesized a few tips for taming the task:
1. Identify relevant a...
