The editors of Nature Nanotechnology invited Ennio Tasciotti, the author of a recent paper in the journal (E. Tasciotti et al. Nature Nanotech. 3, 151–157; 2008), to share his story of the road to success — from planning experiments to writing the manuscript — with Nature Network readers.
Tasciotti says that, at first, the idea of writing a manuscript for publication in a Nature journal seemed “very scary” to him. “When I first wrote my paper (I rewrote it at least 10 times) I basically wrote it thinking in Italian. Very flowery… too flowery. If I think about how many files I had gathered to generate a publication of only 8 pages… it’s something that still affects me! But those 8 pages tell everything that was important to say. Scientific English is a very simple language.”
His advice to prospective authors is that you don’t have to use too many words, specify too much information in one sentence, or write everything you have in your mind. “Keep it simple!” Another tip is to read a lot of papers, especially those from the journal you want to publish in.
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From the blogosphere
An archive of the "From the Blogosphere" column on the Authors page in Nature, highlighting nature.com blog posts of interest to scientists in their role as authors and peer-reviewers. We welcome comments and suggestions.
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An author's road to success -- 29 May 2008
- Date:
- Thursday, 29 May 2008 - 07:53 GMT
Last updated: Thursday, 29 May 2008 - 07:53 GMT
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Comments
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Nice story.
If you think of a concept, there is a high change that you will be using fewer words (or chars) if you write it in English, compared to Italian.
It may be true that Italian is a simplification of Latin, but Latin was probably more succinct.
1 If you say Fate silenzio you are being rude
I wonder if that means Jenny might change the title of her weblog?
Tasciotti sounds like he has his head screwed on, anyway.
don’t [...] use too many words, specify too much information in one sentence, or write everything you have in your mind. “Keep it simple!” is fantastic advice and should be taught at Uni. School, even.
Yes, it is a lovely account, and I encourage anyone reading my summary here to read Ennio’s account in full at the Nature Nanotechnology – Asia Pacific and Beyond forum. (Linked also provided in the post.)
Maybe we should all change our blog titles to Italian, they sound so much more, well, romantic.
You think?
just in case (Richard beat me!)
1 doesn’t work anymore
I love them!
May I ask why mine doesn’t work any more? Sorry if this is obvious, but I don’t speak any Italian or Latin!!
On a side note, I once went on a multi-country trip with a friend. Before we left I told her that I could speak tourist-level French and German, so I’d do the talking in France, Switzerland, Luxembourg and Belgium. “Great, I’ll do the talking in Italy!” she replied.
At the border it became apparent that she didn’t speak a word of Italian, but had studied Latin for three years.
Amazingly enough she got by just fine as long as she could persuade people to write down what they were saying!
Cath,
it just loses its nice link to your last name as you put it into Italian. Nothing personal!
Renaissance becomes Rinascimento, so you can no longer put ENNIS into it as cleverly as you did in English.
Ah, so it doesn’t work in the sense that it doesn’t work. Sorry, I was obviously being a bit dim earlier!