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Oops, science is POWERFUL!
ENGL 390, 390H, and (sometimes) 398V Class Journal
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2nd to last week: refinements and setting up two Trains for the final destination
More Weihnachten charm. Tonight is beginning of XMas holiday in many Teutonic countries. Put out your shoes with hay and carrots for Sinter Klaus's reindeer. I will tell a little story in class today about Amanita fungi and the flying Santa tradition, from ethnobotany. Also, as St. Nick will visit me, I will bring treats on Wednesday for you to take with you at the end of class.
Let's talk some refinements about your review (Assignment 3) at this point. Nearly everything I present now concerns possible weak spots in these documents.
ETHOS PARAGRAPH and conventions of science style in this genre. How is your ethos paragraph, within the first portion of your document? Here are some refining details on that:
- For lead author, use first and last name in the first mention, then,
- shift to land name only (NO DOCTORAL TITLES);
- Give author ethos of
- discipline
- current institution
- PhD granting institution
- DO NOT USE THE ARTICLE TITLE, as this is often too long and even visually awkward, instead,
- use a phrase or two about the content in your ethos paragraphs; and
- name the journal (USE ITALICS); and, finally,
- give the year of publication.
Achieving cognitive FLOW for reader: Now, some review and discussion with examples of two important "binding" or cohesion strategies: metadiscourse and counting out. Recall the magic numbers of cognition? Build further "flow" for your readers by alerting them to the numbers. For example,
Let's turn now to three points from Higgs' paper on particle physics.
Among the many important findings from Kimmerer-Wall's research are two innovative methods. The first method to explore is. . .
These two methods supported her in finding the mosaic genetics patterns in maize species of Northern Mexico. This new understanding of maize landraces is the chief takeaway of Kimmerer-Walls classic 1998 work. More than 1287 citations acknowledge her contribution to plant ecosystem genetics.
Do you also see the claim-argument pattern or rhetorical move in this last example? Preview: we will talk more about claim and argument on Wednesday and Friday. This make-a-claim (by authors in article) and argument is the most powerful organizing principle of how knowledge is described and promoted.
More on achieving FLOW still with counting, combined with metadiscourse, is really powerful to thread cognition for readers. Sample phrases YOU CAN USE:
Having noted essential definitions to understand the findings of Mazela and Chimbley, let's turn now to their first point.
These brief, working definitions set the stage for Mazela and Chimbley's work on ammonia fixation in water systems. Let's turn to their first point concerning ammonia deposition rates.
In addition to the field method described here, a second method innovation is worth our attention.
Next, let's look at the distribution analysis of Kim.
A third point useful for clinical trials concerns their discussion of biomarkers.
Finally, immunologists will be particularly intrigued by the array of IGG markers seen in the control patient group.
VOICE to showcase them and introduce you: PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE DO THIS. So many students forget this powerful signal to the reader about author/researcher work and your commentary upon this work. Hint: this voice shift in science is one of the ways we attribute knowledge to the writer. This is a type of citation, actually.
Song parodoy moment: Also, for fun, enjoy this clever song parody. Can you figure out the song being rifffed upon? Parodies rely on audience experience of the referenced material. Just another reminder that audiences are often sorted out by time lines, especially regarding culture.
Marybeth Shea
Oh, two train rides to the end. Train to Atlanta (close up class earlier) and Train to Boulder (close up later). In other words, you now have two different timelines (due dates) to complete class. See your ELMS Calendar for details.
Wrapping up little culture detail. Here is the Amanita+Santa story (2020) NPR quick read/four-minute listen that includes mention of Harvard. Let's talk about the ethos of PBS and Harvard in this weird topic. More on the Sami people and their ethnobotanical knowledge.
We have gingerbread treats today. And, we can look at last year's Office Hours in the Sky/AMA about the final paper.
TRAIN to Atlanta schedule
- Writing TASK Friday (Dec. 9) followed by a Review TASK open on weekend and due on
- Monday, December 11 (last day!), which is a prelude to the
- Parking Lot for the Atlanta TRAIN opening on Wednesday, Dec 14. Try to complete no later than Monday, the 19th. Email me when you have completed this final submission of Assignment 3!
TRAIN to BOULDER schedule
- Writing TASK Friday (Dec. 16) followed by a Review TASK open on weekend and due on
- Monday, December 19) which is a prelude to the
- Parking Lot for the Boulder TRAIN opening on Dec 23, which is a Friday. Email me when you have completed this final submission of Assignment 3!
Marybeth Shea
Friday.
Happy Friday and your protected time to manage your work! I am available online today between 9-9:50, 10-10:50 and 11-11:50. Here is your GoogleMeet code (same for all Fridays this semester).
TRAIN Atlanta, is open for the Writing Task/Reviewing Tasks IF YOU PLAN TO COMPLETE CLASS EARLY. If you post here, you commit to responding quickly to help others meet their Assignment 3 due window EARLY in FINALS. PLEASE BE AN ETHICAL PERSON IN THESE LAST DAYS.
Reposting from Wednesday's entry, a summary of how these last assignment patterns work (also links on your ELMS calendar).
TRAIN to Atlanta schedule
- Writing TASK Friday (Dec. 9) followed by a Review TASK open on weekend and due on
- Monday, December 11 (last day!), which is a prelude to the
- Parking Lot for the Atlanta TRAIN opening on Wednesday, Dec 14. Try to complete no later than Monday, the 19th. Email me when you have completed this final submission of Assignment 3!
TRAIN to BOULDER schedule
- Writing TASK Friday (Dec. 16) followed by a Review TASK open on weekend and due on
- Monday, December 19) which is a prelude to the
- Parking Lot for the Boulder TRAIN opening on Dec 23, which is a Friday. Email me when you have completed this final submission of Assignment 3!
Here is a Boulder song BUT invokes an airplane ride.
Take a look at this fabulous concision table (MSWord doc, two pages) that shows substitutions. Three of faculty members in PWP wrote this for you. Is a good and short companion to the Manchester University Academic Phrasebank. Here is the Conclusions section of MU AP.
Here is another handout that can help us be deliberate about subject placement in sentences and paragraphs: The Red Ridinghood Handout (Two-pages, MS Word document) is a way to think again about narrative patterns in writing, even science writing.
This image to the right is a reminder to you that you can pay attention to your definition strategies. Recall that you have two places to place them!
- As part of the three or four paragraph cognitive wedge and/or
- Localized -- think nested -- short definitions within your body paragraphs.
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POST T-Day CATCH UP: PAY ATTENTION
In class today, we will return to last week where I will emphasize some items for FRIDAY's next Writing Task+Review Task as we lock down this work.
I report, regretfully, that so many of you are behind in a number of tasks. Sigh.
If you are on the Take 2 path I built just before Thanksgiving, that Writing Task is now closed. BUT, the Review Task is open and I would like people to complete that ASAP.
If you have not completed the Coffee Cup Memo, PLEASE DO SO AND EMAIL ME. Then, I am prompted to grade you.
FOR ALL: New type of ELi Review Task up: A Revision Plan Task for you to take stock of where you are with Assignment 3. Open NOW. Complete by Wednesday. PLEASE. UPDATE Mon. 10:16 AM -- Apparently, if you go into the previous tasks to grab a comment or two, this opens up a localized Revision Plan option/screen. I DO NOT WANT YOU TO DO THIS. You can and should look at early rounds of Peer give+take. But, primarily, I want you to write your revision plan using the prompts I wrote for you. Make sense?
Now, some German Christmas kitsch incoming:
Marybeth Shea
WEDNESDAY!
Do you remember Monday's bead formations for Point and Analysis?
We will talk further about location choices regarding analysis writing and consider the stats analysis (numerical analysis; exploratory data analysis, etc.) paragraph. We will also talk about choices regarding definitions. Earlier and in your celery flow chart, definitions are clustered in the cognitive wedge of the first three or so paragraphs of your analysis.
Both of these choices are somewhat similar as in you have a location to think about. And, volume of "stuff": consider
- smaller definitions set off by punctuation in an appositive -- think bunny ears, paws, and hind feet
- small analysis paragraphs between your body paragraphs of cool points -- think gold beads between larger pearls.
Voice helps, too, in analysis. Use first person in your analysis "moves" and third person when presenting more generally.
We will also look at a Google Doc from an earlier semester where we took on questions the week before the one-article review was due. Can be instructive, I think.
Let's also look at language helpers from the Manchester University Academic Phrasebank and a few other places. Critique and counter argument for junior scientists is hard. Having some phrases to prime the pump can be helpful.
Wikimedia Common, under Creative Commons license
Manchester University academic writing phrase bank. Look at all these sections:
Now, to what we are doing, with some additional "free" phrases for you to start sketching out how to write about stats:
The sample size in treatments two and three is small (7, 12).
I remain unclear how the experiment addresses the central research question noted in the Introduction section.
The sample size is small, making this work exploratory. I look forward to seeing more work before drawing a conclusion about clinical use.
In the fourth steps of the proof, you would have to accept some unusual assumptions on the limit factors.
For Friday, we will have a Writing Task/Review Task routine that closes on Monday ngiht (as per usual). I will also post a mini lesson on the limits of p-values since critical thinking about this important test will help you draw conclusion in robust and measured ways.
CUTE pix to reduce stress:
Week 13: simmering with one-article review plus TURKEY
Over the break, keep thinking about your one-article review. Here is a checklist-style document we will look at today.
Documents have beginnings, middles, and ends. Now, can you determine if your article is LEMON-shaped or more pear shaped.
For such an ending, you need to guage importance, novelty, immediate use/application, excitingness.
Most research articles are lemon-shaped because the results themselves carry the primary interest of the techncial reader.
Classic example of the pear-shaped article would be the Watson and Crick set of articles in the post-WWII rush to do science. Let's visit slides 9-12 of the Google set on research articles.
Back to the overal structure. Here is a good way to arrange your analysis:
Beginning: 1-3 paragraphs that prepare the reader to understand and trust the center portion of your analysis (three or four body paragraphs). Use a cognitive wedge strategy aka "lemon nipple." Think:
-
- Opening (see the seven strategies presented last week-- you can combine them.)
- Citation/Ethos of lead author (see detail below)
- Definitions/descriptions or backgrounds, which is largely common knowledge. You should think about these necessary items over the break.
Middle: 3-4 body paragraphs. Start with one paragraph per point BUT you may need to divide complex material into two shorter but connected (by transition) paragraph. These are your larger paragraphs. You MAY need to nest small definitions -- use the appositive technique -- near the material.
End: Taper off, with some useful information or thoughts for closing. For example, brief critique (this is hard and will NOT count against your work grade-wise), applications, further line of inquiry, implications for society.
New links for class discussion today:
Academic language phrase bank (really useful for analysis and writing). Spend some time here AND save the link. Thank you to the fine folks at Manchester University, UK.
DETAIL Citation/ethos/introduce your lead researcher: in class, we will talk about the conventions of citation in a close read of an article. Basically, the steps are:
- first mention, full name (in the ethos paragraph that also introduces the article).
- (author, date)
- last name throughout
- Example: Marybeth Shea is a professor of technical writing at the University of Maryland. She studies stasis theory in environmental policymaking. Her research article appears in the Journal of Conservation Biology and is the subject of this review (Shea, 2014). Then, in rest of document, refer to the work using the last name:
- Shea's approach...
- Her findings...
- What Shea's inference fails to account for...
Onto house keeping:
So many people did not make it into peer review that sigh, my heart sank. I will open an identical place for the late arrivals today. Please DO THIS OVER THE BREAK. I will post on the ELMS Calendar and email the group.
12 people have not posted. And, 15 people posted late. If you are in those two groups, I need to make something today for you to enter into a Review Task.
For those who did post on time, all peer editing is due tonight for each other.
Seven people STILL NEED TO GIVE ME A COFFEE CUP MEMO. Please email when you have done this.
Week 12: one-article review work ABT and selective counting
From the Reading Grid posted last week, here are two elements we focus on today (screen clips/open in new tab):
;)
;)
Let's look at the ABT statement you will need to do by Friday. Here are links to resourses you need to understand how to do these statements. (from the Reading Grid clips):
TaDAH! , in Andrew Revkin’s words (channeling Randy Olson, Trey Parker, and Aristotle).
Next focus from the Reading Grid is the power of selective counting:
Recall the “power of three, four, or seven” of George Miller (1956) BUT also look at this 2012 Science Daily summary of “four is magical” ; bottom line?
Three or four, plus perhaps subclusters of related ideas for a total of seven is a good strategy for audience cognition and memory.
Marybeth Shea
Wednesday! We talk in detail about ABT statements. This slide set includes ABT statements guided by Randy Olson himself with MS and PhD students in environmental science. Look at the complexity and technical detail! At the end of the slide set is a Google doc where you can see me guide medical humanities students into writing ABT statements.
You will use and ABT statement or two in Friday night's Writing Task, prompt opened this afternoon. By popular request I should bold and use large point size.
Friday night 11.45PM (grace halo period until about 11AM Saturday), post an Eli Review Writing Task. (Link updated at 3.41 Wednesday AND on your ELMS Calendar).
Monday night 11.45PM, post your Eli Review Review Task.
BE ON TIME FOR EACH OTHER, please.
Have five or so points? You can think also of dividing into a point used in your intro and/or appoint used to close.
Here are seven ways+examples to open a document. And, the way you close an article can borrow from these openings (based on the now defunct Cain Technical Writing E-Text project formerly hosted at Rice University.
Now, I want to look at how IMRAD and ABT work together. And yes, we hear/see from Randy Olson again. Two qualities to contrast are:
- Narrative structure, ABT, follows a horizontal axis arrow (times arrow, actually)
- Rational->irrational structure -- head, heart, guts, gonads/sex organs-- follows a vertical axis, where the action is from top down.
Five minutes, with an Australian scientist/interview:
Humanizing science! Emotion and humor in just the right proportion and timing. Aristotle would call this kairos.
Marybeth Shea
Happy Friday and your protected time to manage your work! I am available online today between 9-9:50, 10-10:50 and 11-11:50. Here is your GoogleMeet code (same for all Fridays this semester).
Here is one follow-up on Randy Olson's work that connects IMRAD structure with ABT narrative frames on communication. This 67-page PDF of a slide set features a few central images that I have captured in a working slide set (six Google slides for now to help you with your work this weekend) for us to use next week. We need to deepen our understanding of ABT as a structure to guide critical thinking and careful, concise writing.
Task reminders:
Friday night 11.45PM (grace halo period until about 11AM Saturday), post an Eli Review Writing Task. (Link updated at 3.41 Wednesday AND on your ELMS Calendar).
Monday night 11.45PM, post your Eli Review Review Task.
Keishai Bahr, PhD, www.bahrlab.com
Week 11: Reading and writing the research review article (assignment 3)
TUESDAY AM UPDATE: Here is your OFFICE HOURS in the
SKY/AMA document (open now at 10 AM). I host between 8-9. You can ask before than time. You can look after that time.
Wednesday? I will open the Eli Review one-week parking lot for the Memo 2 for a grade.
Friday? I open a place on Eli Review for you to start thinking and reading about your one-article review. Let's talk about this important prewriting assignment. First, here is a long googe doc (arranged in tables) for you to copy/download to track your reading. Next, let's talk about the shape(s) of this document. Recall the use of the cognitive wedge that can govern a small document but also can guide us on large document sections. We also worked a bit on the cognitive wedge (and the related rhomboid). I will draw a picture in class to remind you. Shape, in a document, relates to arrangement (think flow chart) but also to three essential portions. Recall how important counting is!
Articles have beginnings, middles, and ends. Think Lemon-shaped to start.(A variation is pear; another variation is the bread loaf). Consider for a moment, the power of the beginning. News article openings are good for the lay audience. Why? Several strategies:
- highly visual
- interesting case
- hook with tidbit of interesting information
- topic (timely)
For technical audiences, open with
- review of logos (detail of costs, population size, enormity of problem)
- controversy
- new application or breaking news
Shifting to craft lessons: Let's look at this recent article in PloS One about writing scientific prose (counting strategy!). We should aways keep the reader in mind. What are craft choices for? To support the reader! In Science, two scientists talk about how they read articles. Ruben writes in the Science blog-sphere with a somewhat lighthearted approach while Pain responds to his piece with her approach. Read the comments!
Cautionary note on article choice: research article, literature review, meta-analysis, proof, proof-of-concept, specialized application, method, opinion or memoir (a physician speculates on end-of-life bedside manner).
Craft resource you may want to save: Here is the "bible" of writing (and reading) scientific prose:
Mayfield (OOPS! Commercial publishing gobbles up a resource again). NEW! Here is a link to Mayfield, at MIT, the open access univeristy hero!
Now, let's look/review at the basic parts of the (intro/Method/Results/Analysis/Discussion (IMRAD) article .
As promised for you about this assignment, a flow-diagram designed with two shapes to help you.
Marybeth Shea
Wednesday morning. Later today, UPDATED this evening: I will open the "parking lot" for the Coffee Cup Memo; lot is for a week or more.
By Thursday, I will open up a WRITE-ONLY task for you about your selected article. Due Friday night.
Today, we chat briefly about items from Monday, that help us think about these elements of science communication:
- scientific writing is different from science writing
- humor does have a role in science, often an insider role and a broader communication role
- however, humor is deeply contextual and often results in pretty serious problems when "leaks" out to community (wider audience).
- gallows or dark humor
- parody of music videos is a wonderful science genre, including for medical students
- however, humor is deeply contextual and often results in pretty serious problems when "leaks" out to community (wider audience).
Oxford comma in science, a short mini lesson in a Google doc with comma iinformation links.
Marybeth Shea
Happy Friday and your protected time to manage your work! I am available online today between 9-9:50, 10-10:50 and 11-11:50. Here is your GoogleMeet code (same for all Fridays this semester).
We chatted briefly about humor in science, with a focus on two qualities of humor in communication:
- can be really effective
- is risky and must be designed and deployed carefully.
The whole Twitter fiasco includes a rabid and vicious take-done of parody by some accounts and not others. Listen to scientist Randy Olson -- and filmmaker -- about how logo and humor contrast in the human (audience) response. Listen for head, heart, guts, and sex organs and the irrational-rational gradient.
Food for thought by a marine biologist who communicates to stabilize the planet because upon the earth we live and move and have our being.
Post tonight in Eli Review (can be done as late as Sunday afternoon) for me, this reading grid with some elements about your article. Directions:
- Download or copy my Google doc to your computer or your Google drive.
- Place the APA citation of your selected article in the one-cell table within the header.
- Fill out at least three of the lilac-colored rows in the table.
- Upload to Eli Review.
Be reading to go forward on openings/closing and author ethos next week. We write this assignment in small portions now until the end of the semester.
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Final thought: humor reflects human complexity. Getting humor right uses skills from critical thinking, acting, elocution, public speaking, timing, cultural sensitivity. Humor requires flexes of the head, heart, gut, and often sex organs (See Randy Olson above). I keep thinking about how tthe president of Ukraine began as a stand up commedian. Wow. Talk about applied pathos.