Pharyngula::Rules for papers (it's always simpler than students think)

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Wednesday, February 16, 2005

Rules for papers (it's always simpler than students think)

PZ Myers • 41 Comments (last page)

Dr Pretorius has put up his Rules for Papers, a short list of simple rules students could follow to make their professors happier. Here are the rule titles; you'll have to go read the whole thing to get the details, but you can get a flavor of what he's saying from this alone.

Rule Number 1: NO BINDERS
Rule Number 2: STAPLERS ARE NOT COMPLICATED DEVICES
Rule Number 3: TITLES ARE IRRELEVANT
Rule Number 4: I HATE YOUR INTRODUCTORY PARAGRAPH
Rule Number 5: I HAVE READ THE BOOK IN QUESTION

I have a strategy for handling the first three problems. I've been experimenting with it as an option, but I'm going to make it a requirement for all of my term papers next Fall: all papers have to be submitted electronically. I love getting assignments turned in via e-mail. They're time-stamped, they're easily manipulated, I can have my mail software sort them for me, and they aren't cluttering up my desk. The binder and stapler problems vanish, and the title is the subject line—students know not to make subject lines long and ornate.

Other advantages are that I can use software to flag basic problems in spelling, and it's easy to grab chunks of text to do simple Google test for plagiarism, if I suspect such a thing. One other very useful property is that I get to format it: I can print out copies with a wide margin and double-spaced, so I can mark it up easily.

It's not so much a rule as it is a peeve, but one thing I'd add to that list is "I HATE MICROSOFT WORD." It's a bulky, clumsy, ugly program that lards files with so much crap and distracts writers with so many useless geegaws that I think it actively conspires to diminish people's writing ability. When I ask for papers to be submitted electronically, I do not mean that I want a Word file as an attachment: I want plain text. Don't fuss over fonts or paragraph formats or borders or margins, just type the words, then copy and paste into an e-mail document. When I write, I always just use a simple text editor (SubEthaEdit is currently the editor of choice), and then if I need to (for instance, because I've got to add superscripts or a complicated table), I'll copy it to Word for final touch-up…but I spend as little time in that wretched mess of a program as I can.

Pretorius's last two rules are good ones, even if they aren't as obvious from the titles. Rule Number 4 is a request to spare us the fluff. Especially in science writing, students should avoid the imaginative, discursive stuff they learn in their creative writing courses; it doesn't help. Cut straight to the problem at hand and set up the question you are trying to answer, nothing more. Rule Number 5 is similar, spare us the generalities. When I've asked you to write about the decapentaplegic pathway in Drosophila, you really don't have to repeat the gist of my introductory lecture on patterning the invertebrate axis—I've heard it before.

Those rules are also essential for answering essay questions on in-class exams. Every time I put an essay question on an exam (like today; I get to go proctor a genetics exam in a few minutes), some will waste valuable time writing introductory paragraphs that I will cursorily scan in order to get to the meat of their argument. All such fripperies are good for is accumulating spelling and grammar errors that will hurt the grade, and eating up time that would be better spent assembling their evidence.

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Comments:

#16172: — 02/16 at 12:05 PM
so i guess writing a paper in LaTeX and submitting it to you as a .pdf wouldn't exactly endear me to you, were i in any of your classes, then...?

#16174: Heliologue — 02/16 at 12:35 PM
I'm glad I'm not in your classes. I write the sort of papers that make English majors squirm in ecstasy. I agree with you about Word, though: the MS Office suite is a tool of the devil.

#16176: — 02/16 at 12:50 PM
MS Word (spit). I've lost count of the number of times I've told my daughter, "Write first -- format later!" Maybe someday it'll stick...

If I were *really* nerdly, I'd find a link to the FoxTrot where Peter spends the whole strip playing with the fonts for the title of his paper.

#16178: — 02/16 at 01:12 PM
Have you used LaTeX before? Nerds in computer science and math use it. I wish more life science types would too. Check out:
http://www.lecb.ncifcrf.gov/~toms/latex.html

#16179: — 02/16 at 01:29 PM
the great thing about LaTeX is that you can revision control your papers. (yeah, i'm that big of a nerd.) the backdraw is that it's not as human-readable as just plain text, which means you really want to compile the final result to a .pdf to get the full benefit, and .pdf's aren't directly editable - a pretty damning flaw.

i wouldn't use it for papers to be submitted electronically, but i have used it for the traditional, dead-tree submission format. so far, none of my instructors have made any mention of it.

#16180: — 02/16 at 01:30 PM

Nerds in computer science and math use it. I wish more life science types would too.

We computer science students prefer the phrase: socially challenged (or if our bosses aren't around, user challenged).

At computer science at the University of Copenhagen, the rules are simple - all reports are to be written in LaTeX. Usually they need to be printed out, but if not, they should be turned in either as a .pdf or a .ps file (using either standard fonts or with the fonts embedded).
If they are printed, they have to be turned in a professional looking plastic sleeve (or a similar device), and absolutely no stamples!

Oh, and not only is an introductionary paragraph requires, so is an abstract.

In other words, fun rant, but very specific to his classes.

#16181: — 02/16 at 01:46 PM
Cut your creative students a bit of slack... if it wasn't for fluffy introductory paragraphs, Stephen J. Gould would be just another nameless paleontologist cribbing ideas from Mayr.

#16183: — 02/16 at 02:18 PM
Yikes! Do you tell your students this ahead of time?
I would hate to think that my professors are secretly thinking this sort of thing without giving their students a clue before the exam. When I was a student, I was always frustrated by the total lack of guidance on what the professor was looking for in a paper and the apparent randomness of grading. The conventional wisdom that I was taught in my (required freshman year) expository writing class was that the intro paragraph was the MOST important, and I always felt pressured to write a good one, even though I felt that it wasn't really all that necessary.

#16184: — 02/16 at 02:25 PM
That's a hysterical list

Another thing that I can never seem to get through to students is to dispense with needlessly ornate language. "The esteemed Dr. Smith wrote that...". "In a truly groundbreaking study...". "Mankind has long pondered whether...". Blech. It's especially amusing if you happen to know Dr. Smith and are thus aware that he's actually not all that well esteemed, and that he throws up a lot.

Oh, and Word does indeed suck major ass. I don't know what committee of loonies decides on the default settings for that thing, but they should all be punished harshly. I don't agree that all of office is crap though - I quite like Excel.

#16185: PZ Myers — 02/16 at 02:25 PM
Yes, I tell my students this stuff. In our intro biology course, I explicitly tell them that a lot of the 'rules' they learned in their freshman college writing courses have to be abandoned or modified for a science course.

The first paragraph IS important, but what's important in science writing is to plainly lay out the specific problem you are addressing, and why it is important. Getting clever and creative in that part is an annoyance.

PZ Myers
Division of Science and Math
University of Minnesota, Morris

#16186: — 02/16 at 02:42 PM

The first paragraph IS important, but what’s important in science writing is to plainly lay out the specific problem you are addressing, and why it is important. Getting clever and creative in that part is an annoyance.

Oh, this I certainly agree with. Clever and creative writing in scientific writing is one of my (many) pet peeves. Precise writing is much more important.
It would certainly be nice if (certain) people would spend a little longer on formulating exactly what they mean, instead of trying to make it sound interesting.

Out of curiosity - what is your prefered way of writing? Passive or non-passive?

#16189: PZ Myers — 02/16 at 02:50 PM
I prefer the active voice, but it's rare to see anyone, especially students, manage to pull it off in their term papers, so I always recommend that they stick with the passive voice.

It's heretical to real writers, I think, but a lot of workaday science writing is dry and formulaic. It has to be.

PZ Myers
Division of Science and Math
University of Minnesota, Morris

#16196: Miranda — 02/16 at 04:33 PM
Eek! I think I should go apologize to some of my professors after reading that list. I'm especially guilty of #4 since I do fair amount of creative writing outside of the more technical classes I take. And I'm having a hard time believing that so many students are gobsmacked by a simple stapler. They make them in really small sizes that easily fit in a backpack or messenger bag.

#16217: bitchphd — 02/16 at 07:13 PM
The first paragraph IS important, but what’s important in science writing is to plainly lay out the specific problem you are addressing, and why it is important. Getting clever and creative in that part is an annoyance.

Um, this is also important in English classes. "Clever and creative" undergraduate writing is almost always dire.

I warned my students this morning against the "dawn of time" introduction. You know, where they try to make their subject Big and Important by beginning, "Since the dawn of time, humans have wondered..."

::Banging head on desk::

#16222: Rana — 02/16 at 08:10 PM
Oh, gad, the "since of beginning of time" paragraph! The bane of history professors everywhere!

I used to tell my students that they should go back, after they had finished the paper, and just pitch out the first paragraph, or reduce it to a single sentence that spells out the plan of attack.

I also insisted that simple clear language was preferable to wordy complicated "impressive" language (especially when the latter was laughably wrong in its connotations).

I'm definitely with you on the staples. I once dramatically faked tripping and tossed all the papers I was returning in the air to demonstrate to the students just why staples are our friends. That, and I started docking 5% off of grades after the first warning for all staple-less papers. (Yes, I was a grading hard-ass. Why do you ask?)

I have to disagree on the matter of titles, though. I did not like _bad_ titles (like "My Paper" or "Assignment Six" or "Since the Beginning of Time") but my students had to be sure that they had a clear statement of the topic and thesis in their title somewhere. (I guess I'm guilty of perpetuating the "silly title: real title" habit - oh well.) It was a way of ensuring that they _could_ reduce their point to a single main idea; students who couldn't do this either had no idea what their point was, or were so vague and wordy that it was clear that the paper was going to be too.

I tried grading electronically once. Alas, I am a person who needs to be able to scribble and circle and draw swoopy arrows, and a stack of papers is so much more portable than a computer.

#16237: — 02/17 at 12:11 AM
Since you are teaching science, maybe you should give them a good example of a scientific paper, explain the various parts, and insist they follow that organization. Every term paper I've written as a geology student required following the standard format, and documenting sources properly. Good practice, and only the first couple of papers are difficult. After that the format becomes second-nature.

Oh, and living in a waste-concious corner of the country, my professors not only hate binders but balk at title pages. Waste of paper. Put the title at the top of page 1.

Turning in unformatted electronic papers only works if there are no diagrams. Another alternative is PDF, which lets the author do the formatting and include diagrams. (It's also a good cross-platform format, for those of us who are no longer followers of Darth Redmond.) Word and OpenOffice both produce reasonable PDF output.

#16242: — 02/17 at 01:38 AM
I love that the first few comments were mainly love for LaTeX. It's a beautiful, beautiful language, and makes science papers (particularly ones involving Greek letters and math equations of any variety) very simple.
Plus, the default font (ComputerModern, I am told) is beautiful. The learning curve is pretty steep, but once you get the hang of it, writing with LaTeX is pretty simple. (And Googling "LaTeX [whatever you need help on]" gives answers, not, surprisingly, porn.)

#16246: — 02/17 at 04:45 AM
That's not true. When I need to look up a LaTeX symbol I search Google for `latex symbols' (no quotes) and click ``I'm feeling lucky." The learning curve isn't that steep on LaTeX. TeX is another story, which prompted the development of LaTeX macros.

#16247: — 02/17 at 04:49 AM
I remember a favoured student of my PhD supervisor who got away with a very "interesting" subtitle in the intro of his PhD thesis. It was a synthetic organic chem PhD on the synthesis of an anticancer natural product. To be blunt, it was a fantastically brilliant piece of research on the part of this student, but he was a self important bugger hence the subtitle:

"Cancer: the enemy of mankind"

Louis

P.S. It wasn't me. Honest.

#16254: GrrlScientist (Hedwig the owl) — 02/17 at 07:16 AM
Uh oh! I am a fluffy writer, I think, and I feel badly about this, too, all of a sudden. I do realize that reading mountains of our students' fluff can only be completed with the aid of several aspirin but .. there is good fluff, too, and I am operating under the delusion that someday I will master the art.

#16276: — 02/17 at 11:21 AM
Maybe I'm a loner on this count, but I actively prefer WordPerfect as word processor of choice. Admittedly, no experience/opportunity with LaTeX. This may just be my physical science background -- nasty tendency toward many equations, and I find the WP equation editor to be both easier to use and more straightforward to locate than that from MS. Same for moving around pictures.

#16291: ajmilne — 02/17 at 01:54 PM
Write first/format later is great wisdom. There is no god but vi. Hail vi.

In the ancient past, working as a reporter, I always used good ole' WordPerfect 4 or 5 something or other (the DOS ones, not the evil relatively bloated Windows 3.x ones which came a bit later). Theoretically, it could format stuff. But reporters just used it as a text processor. It was WordPerfect mostly 'cos, probably, the pagination programs would have an import filter. Someone else (or, on smaller papers, you again, but later the same day) would worry about formatting. This was a good thing. Meant you focussed on what you're supposed to focus upon: coherent prose. Not which race of Garamond it was to appear in. You're trying to crank out copy to fill papers--so not dicking around with menus, fonts, and margins is an essential discipline. And a mouse--ummm--hey, what the hell's *that* for? Text is linear. You don't so much need a pointing device principally devised to get you to such and such a pixel when all those cursor keys are right there on the keyboard, ready to take you to whichever word or character--and awfully quickly, once repeated use has pretty much made them part of your nervous system's firmware.

Don't know what it is about office suites that word processing software has to get more and more and more bloated. Always suspected it had as much to do with the software vendor wanting a few more bucks for the next upgrade than it did with demand. In any case, it does get absurd... I'm still waiting for the version of Word which contains code for controlling a toaster... possibly via USB. Wonder if I'll wait long.

Nowadays, I do a lot of stuff with KDE's Kate (including LaTeX) when I've got the environment about. It's light, fast, and friendly about keeping large numbers of docs open and at your fingertips--good, therefore, for code, in particular.

#16298: — 02/17 at 03:23 PM
ajmilne, I haven't looked that closely at VBScript, but as long as the toaster exposed a COM-compliant interface, I could probably control it from Word with a little swearing.

#16301: ajmilne — 02/17 at 04:01 PM
Guess it had to happen... Dunno about doing that ActiveX interface (I don't do ActiveX, even when threatened) -- but I can to get to work on that Toast-Over-Universal Serial Bus (or should it be 'Cereal' Bus) -- or TOUSB draft standard. Assuming someone hasn't already done it:

Message format 1: Toast darkness

Toast darkness fields in TOUSB conform to the standard ANSI ranges for existing toasters, and are specified in the 8-bit payload field DARKNESS_FLD. Allowable values include:

0x00 -- raw and doughy
0x01 -- burn (default)
0x02 -- burn with definition (element coils MUST be engraved in surface of bread)
0x03 -- char with extreme prejudice
0x04 -- set fire to kitchen

... Toaster may respond with the POP_ACK message. Allowable values for the RESPONSE field are:

0x00 -- sorry -- just toasted something; if you send your message again, I'll just ring a bell and pop up right away
0x01 -- so sorry, jammed. (Client may respond with a INSERT_KNIFE_ZAP_OUCH message).
0x02 -- your wish is my command. It's as good as charred.

... and, as usual. I'm way off topic. Apologies, all.

#16311: — 02/17 at 07:45 PM
Jeff, if you need a lot of equations (and want them to look good), there's no beating LaTeX. you'll have to scale a learning curve, though - it's not the kind of graphical, build-equation-as-you-go interface you're likely used to; instead, you'll have to learn a language for describing equations in plain text - but the finished result comes out gorgeous. seriously.

even plain old prose looks better in LaTeX than with anything else i've found or used, but typesetting math specifically was what Knuth designed TeX for to begin with, and so far nobody's improved on the results his code gets.

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Wednesday, February 16, 2005

Rules for papers (it's always simpler than students think)

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