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Monday, December 8

Monday, December 8. Revision Odds and Ends IPHY 3700 Writing Process Map. Guidelines for Writing Titles. 1. The title should reflect the key aspects that define the research issue, without overwhelming readers with details.

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Monday, December 8

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  1. Monday, December 8 Revision Odds and Ends IPHY 3700 Writing Process Map

  2. Guidelines for Writing Titles 1. The title should reflect the key aspects that define the research issue, without overwhelming readers with details. 2. As a very general rule, titles of scientific papers should be in the range of 8 to 15 words. 3. Try to eliminate words like 'the', 'of', 'on', 'A Study of', 'An Experiment on', 'A Review of,' 'A Proposal for'. 4. The title should reflect the unique aspects of the research issue. 5. The title should reflect the overall purposes, and perhaps even the key outcomes and conclusions, of the study and the paper. Examples

  3. Guidelines for Writing Section Headings 1. Include words and phrases that directly reflect key aspects of the section's content and your rhetorical goal for the section. 2. Try to limit the heading to 4-8 words. 3. Use a sans-serif font (maybe bold it) to accentuate the heading, but don't increase the font size. 4. Follow discipline-specific guidelines for positioning headings. If instructions to authors don't include guidelines for positioning headings, center them or place them on the left margin. Examples

  4. Shaping Content and Tone to Consider Audience: First Draft Issue: Whether sleep deprivation is responsible for errors committed by medical residents Audience: Mothers reading a parenting magazine Currently, medical residents work up to 136 hours per week, leaving 32 hours in the week for sleeping, eating, recreating, and socializing. In addition, residents are commonly on call for 72 hours consecutively. This work schedule has been the dogma for medical resident training in the United States for many years. However, due to the growing body of scientific findings relating sleep deprivation with impaired cognitive performance, the practice of long work hours for residents has come under scrutiny. In fact, the American Medical Student Association, the Committee of Interns and Residents, and Public Citizen recently filed a petition to the Occupational Health and Safety Administration to reduce work hours of residents to no more than 80 hours per week and on-call periods to 24 hours or less. However, this proposal has been met with considerable resistance from the medical community because long work hours in resident training are a long-established tradition and are thought to be crucial to timely training. . . .

  5. Shaping Content and Tone to Consider Audience: Revision Issue: Whether sleep deprivation is responsible for errors committed by medical residents Audience: Mothers reading a parenting magazine Imagine yourself sitting in the emergency room of a hospital waiting for adoctor to treat your child. To your surprise, a medical resident is assigned to the case. This situation is quite common in hospitals across the country. As the resident enters the room, she yawns. How would you feel about the fact that this resident may be nearing the end of her shift, which could have lasted up to 24 hours? On the one hand, you might think that this young doctor is well trained, conscientious, and diligent—just the person you want to treat your child. Another reasonable response might be a reaction to that yawn, a sign of possible sleep deprivation: “I don’t care how hard-working and well-trained she is,” you might say, “I don’t want her treating my child!” The two contrasting responses above are also reflect by findings from published research on the effects of sleep deprivation on the performance of medical residents. Some studies show that . . .

  6. Diagnosing Topic Sentences 1. Ask, "Does the paragraph have a sentence that captures the central topic, message, and goal? If not, does the paragraph need one?“ 2. Ask, "Does the sentence effectively ground readers to the central topic, message, and goal for the paragraph? 3. Ask, "Is the sentence positioned effectively in the paragraph (usually at the top of a paragraph, to avoid a bottom-up structure)?“ 4. Ask, "Does the sentence make a specific promise, or instill a well-defined expectation, about the content to follow? And, does the content of the paragraph fulfill the topic sentence's promise?“ 5. Ask, "Does the sentence effectively forecast the structure or pattern of ideas that follow?“ 6. Ask, "Does the sentence effectively establish the logical relationship between the paragraph and surrounding paragraphs?

  7. Key Problems Involving Topic Sentences (CTS) 1. No topic sentence, when the paragraph really needs one 2. Vague topic sentences—that is, ones that don't reflect what, specifically, the paragraph is about 3. Topic sentences that don't ground readers to the rhetorical goal for the paragraph

  8. Diagnose My Topic Sentence Rhetorical Goal: To Acknowledge and Refute the Counterargument (1) Lane et al. conducted a cross-sectional study to determine whether long-distance running is associated with an increased risk for developing osteoarthritis. (2) The subjects were 41 runners (mean age = 57.5 years old) and 41 nonrunners who served as controls (mean age = 57.7 years old). (3) The subjects filled out questionnaires to provide information about their running history and medical background. (4) The subjects were then given an x-ray exam of the knees and spine. (5) The x-rays were evaluated for indices of severity of bone spurs and sclerosis; in addition, the width of the interarticular joint space was measured. (6) The results indicated no differences in these measures between the runners and controls. (7) Thus, Lane et al. concluded that running does not increase the risk of developing osteoarthritis. (7) The runners in this study reported running an average of 12,547 miles over 9.2 years. (8) This amounts to only 26.2 miles per week, or 3.7 miles per day, which obviously creates a problem for the interpretation of Lane et al.'s results.

  9. Grounding Readers to Your Rhetorical Goal (1) The results from a study conducted by Nancy Lane and colleagues contradict my claim that long-distance running increases the risk for developing osteoarthritis. (2) Indeed, the researchers concluded that their results "do not suggest an increase in clinical osteoarthritis or in radiologic cartilage loss in runners, even when extreme running distances are involved." (3) I would argue, however, that Lane's results and conclusions are flawed because the study's subjects did not run "extreme" distances. (4) The subjects were 41 runners (mean age = 57.5 years old) and 41 nonrunners (mean age = 57.7 years old) who served as controls. (5) They filled out questionnaires . . . [the paragraph goes on to explain the key methods, the key results, and the methodological flaw involving the relatively low number of miles run by Lane's subjects]

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