= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Stefan_Schubert comments on How to write an academic paper, according to me - Less Wrong Discussion
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (27)
This is excellent. I've had some vague ideas along these lines, but nothing this comprehensive and precise. Very helpful.
In a sense, the paper consists of three parts - title, abstract, and text - whereas there are five types of readers, according to your classificatory schema (though how to delineate these types of course is a bit arbitrary). One question is whether one should have even more layers, to clarify exactly what a skimmer and full reader should read. (This does exist to some extent - e.g. footnotes and appendices presumably are not for skimmers - but one could develop this further.) For instance, each section of the text could start off with a "mini-abstract" which the skimmers could focus on.
I get the sense that today's article formats are intended to satisfy deep readers (aside from the title and abstract readers) and that more could be done to help, e.g., skimmers. This is just a hunch, though, and I'd be interested in hearing whether people agree with this.
In some journals there is a text box with up to four take home message sentences summarizing what the paper gives us. It is even easier to skim than the abstract, and typically stated in easy (for the discipline) language. I quite like it, although one should recognize that many papers have official conclusions that are a bit at variance with the actual content (or just a biased glass half-full/half-empty interpretation).