Connotea tags for good and well-written papers
Maxine Clarke
Friday, 04 April 2008 07:41 UTC
There are Connotea tags for good paper journal club and well written paper
Please add any papers that you condsider to be “good” and/or “well written” to either or both of these Connotea tags. They don’t have to be Nature papers, of course, they can be papers that have been published anywhere in the peer-reviewed literature.
Updated 04 April 2008 07:41 UTC
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Replies
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I am looking for examples of POORLY written papers to use in a scientific writing course. Authors names can be removed to protect the innocent (or not so innocent). Any help?
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There are examples of poor writing at Linda’s Time for a Change blog.
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We were discussing whether we should also talk about poorly written papers. But I believe that the consensus was to focus on well-written papers for the time being. They are so much harder to find.
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Although this reply is pretty late considering the original post, I want to go “on record” so to speak that using poorly written papers is probably NOT a good strategy for teaching successful writing. This is an experienced-based claim, not evidence-based, though I think a short study could be put together easily enough to test it. My experience says that poor writing and good writing do not make for an equal relationship. That is, learning how to identify good writing can help one identify bad writing, but learning to identify bad writing does not help in identifying good writing. For beginners, this is an important difference. Good writing is defined as the presence of certain features. When those features are not present, the written work is less successful…though not necessarily bad. Bad writing also has some defining features, but the lack of those does not make a piece of writing good. Also, beginners don’t have an arsenal of knowledge to fall back on. Seeing bad writing doesn’t help them choose good tactics because they don’t know them. All they know is that is doesn’t work. Rather than introduce students to published examples of poorer writing, I stick with good examples, and use papers like “The Science of Scientific Writing” (my fave, and on the Connotea site) which includes poorly written published excerpts. That way, the students’ desire to see “bad stuff” gets satisfied, but is safely tucked away into an article on good writing.
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I agree that it’s never sufficient to expose bad writing – writers need to see solutions to the stylistic and syntactical problems as well. So I suggest that the first step is to identify a poorly written text, deconstruct it carefully and point out exactly where and why the writer has failed, then offer a revision to the original. In this way, researchers learn to spot, diagnose, and then correct weak writing.
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