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Writing as an equation

Hey all! 

I hope you’re having a good week.

I want to expand on some concepts from the last module. I asked you to watch a few videos from Craft of Scientific Writing. I think it’s a decent source to check out if you want to continue practicing specific parts of writing scientific articles, and I would recommend book marking it as something to go back to when you have to write different documents in other classes.

Now to the granular details of writing for engineering. Did you know that it is common practice to mimic writing styles in academia? We mimic what people have done before us and change the content. Academics rarely write from scratch. This is a helpful tool! We can use a formula to make the writing easier.

For most scientific documents, we use a sentence formula that is not dissimilar to a math equation. These formulas are constructed through a system of “moves” and “steps”. 

Dr. Budsaba Kanoksilapatham created a worksheet that shows the different moves and steps in a typical academic research paper. Each “move” is the information you’re trying to claim/establish and each “step” is how to support the move. The PDF is attached below. Dr. Kanoksilapatham shows the various moves and steps for the Introduction, Methods, Results and Discussion section of a journal article. We can even pause for a second and think about how most articles even follow the same formatting convention (as a clue to support my statement that academics are rarely writing from scratch and instead repurposing much of what has already been written).

In the last module I had you look at the document sections and highlight where you saw the different writing conventions mentioned in the videos. For this week, I would like you to return to https://arxiv.org/ and find an article where you can identify the different moves and steps within the document. Identify and highlight the various sentences that are in the IMRD worksheet. You can do the analysis on any one of the four sections: Introduction, Methods, Results, or Discussion – just make sure the article you choose has a good example of one of the sections. 

My hope is that by demystifying the code of how these scientific articles are written, you’ll be able to access the act of writing with a bit more ease. 

That’s all for now! Next week we’ll get back on track working towards collective liberation.
 

Course Info

Professor: Andréa Stella (she/her/hers)

Email: astella@ccny.cuny.edu

Zoom: 4208050203

Slack:engl21007spring22.slack.com/