Welcome to Week four of Writing in the Sciences.
I'm Kristin Sainani from Stanford University.
So, in the first three weeks of this course, we talked about ways to improve
your writing. We talked about some key principles of
effective writing. How to write better sentences and how to
write better paragraphs. So in the first module of this week, we're
just going to practice all of those skills.
So we're gonna do some practice on editing paragraphs.
And for this module, I actually do want you to test yourself.
So I'm going to tell you, at certain points, to pause the video and edit
paragraphs. And then you can restart the video and
join back in. And I'll go over my editing.
You can kinda compare what you did to, to what I did.
So actually I might start there with just a.
Quicknote Last week we talked about experimenting with punctuation using the
semi-colon, the dash, the parentheses and the colon.
And just in case you're still feeling a little bit timid about using that kind of
exotic punctuation in your scientific article.
I saw this week an article in Nature Physics which has an impact factor of
nineteen. So it's a great journal.
This was written by two physicists. And notice, I pulled out one of their
paragraphs. Notice that they Very much used the
semi-colon, dash, colon, and parentheses. So, here's one example paragraph.
I'm not going to read it all. I'll let you kind of read it on your own.
But you can see that it's very effective. It's a very clear and well written
article. They use these punctuation marks
effectively. And it is okay to use them, and it's even
encouraged to use them. And they always have a whimsical title for
their article, which is always nice. So now, let's jump right into the
exercises for this module again I want you to test yourself a little bit so I'll
kinda give you some, some guidance on each of this paragraphs and then I'm going to
ask you to pause the video and edit it up, edit it on your own.
So each of the paragraphs that I picked for this module.
I try to pick things that don't require a lot of technical background or too much
context so that everybody should be able to edit that.
So I'm not going to bother to read through the entire paragraph, cuz you can read it
on your own. But this first paragraph's basically
telling you a taxonomy about some different terms that are used when we talk
about measuring the quality of instruments.
So I want you to read through it and edit it, keeping in mind that you're trying to
put into play all of these different tools that I've given you.
So kind of try to cut a lot of unnecessary clutter, get it down to it's to the heart
of the matter. So why don't you pause the video now and
when you're done editing, then go ahead and restart the video and I'll go through
my edits on this. Alright, so hopefully you came up with a
nice, solid edit on, on that paragraph. When I was editing that the first thing I
kinda asked myself is just what's the paragraph about.
What's the idea contained in that paragraph.
So what the authors are trying to convey is this taxonomy of these different terms
used to assess the quality of an instrument.
And It's kind of a complicated paragraph. It's a little bit boring, right?
Because it's just about terms, which is never the most interesting thing to read.
And actually, my first instinct, when I read that paragraph was to put everything
in a table. And, you can imagine that this paragraph,
rather than being in prose. This information could have actually
probably been better presented as a table or even a nice little tree diagram.
So there are a lot of instances, and you should be on, aware of them.
Watch out for them where, it might be better to put something in a figure rather
than to put it in prose. It just lends itself better to a figure
So, but this is, I came up with a, you know,
I put it in a little table so we have, you know, kinda, the domains.
That's the highest level. And then we get the sub-level of
measurement property. And then below that, we have aspect.
And here's how all those terms fill those fill that in.
So then, I, I got to use that framework to help myself edit.
This paragraph. And hopefully you came up with something
that was similarly short. Right?
We don't need a lot of words to give this taxonomy.
So I paired it down to, we assess each instrument based on reliability, validity,
and responsiveness. These domains may be subdivided into
measurement properties. Reliability includes these three
measurement properties. Validity includes these other three.
And responsiveness is both a domain and a measurement property.
So they had a, kind of a long, spiel in the original, where they were explaining,
well, you know? It's kind of actually funny.
I'm gonna scroll back to it here. They were saying, oh, but for reasons of
clarity, the domain and the measurement property have the same name.
And I was thinking, well, that actually makes it more confusing to me, not more
clear. But anyway, I kind of paired down that
whole discussion by just saying, The responsiveness is both a domain and a
measurement property. Then we go to the next level.
Some measurement properties additionally contain multiple aspects.
For example, construct validity includes structural validity, hypothesis testing,
and cross-cultural validity. So moving onto the second exercise,
This one is actually two paragraphs long. But I'm going to encourage you to try to
think of a way to bring it down, together into a single paragraph cuz I think it
actually probably it only lends itself to one paragraph.
So this was from a study where they were looking at church records.
And this is from their method section. They're trying to tell you a little bit
about those records with what, where they came from and what information is in them.
So again, it's two paragraphs long. I just want to draw your attention to the
very last line. We're not going to read through the whole
thing. You can read through it on your own.
But the very last line of the second paragraph is kind of funny. So it says,
when a member dies and the clerk reports his/her death to the church membership
council, the membership record is updated and then archived in the church's deceased
membership file. So, notice that if, you know, you're
reading that along, it sounds like it's the membership file, it's the file that's
deceased, right? So it has this kind of funny thing with
adjectives. So you want to be careful with adjectives,
'cause you can come up with funny things like deceased files.
So obviously you're going to want to edit that last line carefully.
So why don't you go ahead and I'm gonna put both of the paragraphs up on a single
slide so you can have them at your fingertips.
Why don't you, now go ahead and pause the video, edit both paragraphs, and then when
you're done, restart the video and I'll kind of walk you through my edits.
All right, so hopefully you were able to get it down to a single paragraph.
So when I was editing this, I asked myself, you know, what's the main idea,
the main point of these paragraphs. And so what I think the main point was, is
that they were just trying to get across that the information that they used for
their study, which was from the church records, that it was accurate and
reliable. And notice in the original version, they
used those terms accurate and reliable several times.
Well, at least they used the term accuracy many times.
So I was able to pair it down by kinda taking away some of the repetition.
So I want to scroll back, and just kind of just point this out to you.
So in the original two paragraphs they you know, they say in the very first sentence,
it's a high level of accuracy. They give you a reference for that and
then they try to give you some details about how this works to kind of verify
that indeed it is accurate. And then in the second paragraph, they go
back to talking a lot about accuracy. Well, the accuracy is dependent.
Each member can review its the record, what year, to check it for accuracies.
For this reason and because the church emphasizes accurate record keeping, the
information is quite reliable, right. So they're, they're repeating those words
accurate and reliable quite a bit. So what I did was just say that's kind of
a pointer all of this information. The main pointer just to say hey, these
records are accurate and reliable. They have a citation for that, there's
somebody who's done a study on that. They also want to back it up by just
explaining how this whole thing works. The other point of this paragraph, is to
get across a little bit of information about exactly what's in those records.
And that's important because that tells you what information they had available to
them for this particular health study. So going back to my edited version, I just
said, you know, I started with the church's record-keeping system as accurate
and reliable. And now I'm going to go through and tell
you a little bit of details about how it works and what information is in there.
When a new member is baptized, the church congregation creates a member record that
includes, notice these have a colon, name, date of birth, parents' names, current
address, and dates of church ordinances. Now, I'll, it's important that until lay
clerk, who does all this, but we don't like to keep repeating the term, lay
clerk. So we say, a lay clerk, enters these
records into the general church database. And updates them to reflect dates of new
ordinances. That can all be in one sentence.
The spells you know, new ordinances, spells, names, changes of address and date
of death. And then that whole second paragraph was
about this idea that the members could review their membership records once a
year, and somehow that was going to improve accuracy?
One thing, notice how I shortened that to a single sentence?
The reason I did that is if you go again back to the original, look at that second
paragraph, it's all about this, you know, the members being able to redo the records
once a year. Well if you think about that carefully, it
says that each member has an opportunity to review their membership record once a
year to check it for accuracy. That's actually fairly ambiguous.
So, there's a lot of words here. But with a great amount of ambiguity about
what's actually happening. So when you say they have an opportunity
to review their membership does that mean that they have just one opportunity?
They're unlimited? They can only review the records once but
they're allowed to review it once. Or does it mean that they're encouraged to
review their records every year? Or is it more passive where they just
could review it should they feel the need to review it?
So there's a lot of ambiguity here, and adding all these extra details and words
here doesn't help address that ambiguity, so I paired that down to a single
sentence. And then that last sentence about when a
member dies, we don't need to know that it's reported to the church membership
council because what we care about here at the records,
That's what we are using for the study so we can get rid of a lot of extra details
here. It's really not that important who is
doing the reporting or who's archiving the records.
We already know lay clerk whose keeping track of these things.
So I just pair that down to when a member dies and the membership record is
achieved. So you can get this down quite a bit.
Hopefully you were able to get something similarly short.
Notice that the last sentence, I allow that to be in the passive voice.
So when a member dies, the membership the record is archived.
Notice there is no subject. I didn't bother to say well, it was the
lay clerk who did the achieving or council member cuz I didn't think it was that
important. So as I've eluded to before,
In the methods section where this was from, sometimes it's okay to have
something in the passive voice when it doesn't really matter who did it.
And what is more important to just get across what was done.
So, sometimes in the method section it's actually okay to use the passive voice.
And I think this is probably a good use of the passive voice here.
Alright. So for the last exercise in this, in this practice module, I'm going to have
you read a paragraph. This was a, from a study where they found
a an association between childhood misbehavior and subsequent drug use.
So they actually you know, Saw some behavior, bad behavior in kids,
and I followed them over time and found later that they had a higher risk of drug
use. So I want you go ahead and now pause the
video, read thru this paragraph, edit it, and then when your done restart the video
and I'll go over my thoughts on this paragraph with you.
Alright, so hopefully you got a good edit of this paragraph.
And I want to point out one thing in particular about this paragraph. So you
might have noticed when you were reading it along that, that word however, was a
little bit funny. Did it, did that strike, I wonder if that
struck some of you as you where reading it right.
So you get a bunch of sentences that are about studies, that have also shown this
link between childhood misbehavior and drug use, and other studies in adults,
that have shown some kind of association between aggressive or bad behavior and
drug use. So you get this information about prior
studies finding a similar link. But then you get a total shift in ideas.
And the authors kind of understood. They realize that they were making a shift
so they threw in a word however there. But then it's not an appropriate use of
however, it sounds funny because it's a, it's a little off, right?
That however is supposed to tell you it's contrasting something in the previous
sentence well this is not. It's just their signal that they're
changing ideas. So, if you're changing ideas, instead of throwing in any random
transition word what you actually want to do of course, is break this into two
paragraphs so I'm hoping a lot of you caught this but there's actually two ideas
going on in this paragraph, the first is, here's all these other studies that
confirm our results. That have found the same thing as us.
And the second, part of this paragraph, which should be its own separate
paragraph, is, what is the possible, mechanism, the pathway that explains our
finding. So you,
Hopefully separated that into two paragraphs.
That's one option. And actually the other option, I'll show
you both, I, I did both and it's, is actually to realize that, maybe some of
the material on previous studies is not really relevant, and we can even delete
that, and make this into one paragraph. So I'm going to show you kind of both ways
that I approached it. So, here was my rewrite where I separated
the ideas of the two bear. So I separated the previous studies from
the pathways, the mechanisms. So, and I shortened things, I did some
editing here, additional editing. Previous studies of linked early child in
conduct problems with subsequent drug use. Studies have also found that young adult
and adult drug users exhibit more aggressive, unconventional and impulsive
behaviors than their peers. So I changed that around a little bit
because I think the young adult and adult studies,
It wasn't very clear in the original but what I think what they were saying there
was that there are studies that show that these things concur aggressive behavior
concurs with drug use in adults. Now those studies actually don't tell you
whether or not the aggressive behavior causes the drug use or whether the drug
use causes the aggressive or unconventional behavior.
So we don't really know from those studies and also those studies are all about
adults when the study that we're dealing with here is about children.
So maybe the fact that studies of adults find that this association is relevant
here, but I actually thought. That perhaps it isn't even really that
relevant. They did a study on childhood conduct
problems, and they linked it prospectively to subsequent drug use where the cause is
clearly you know, the aggressive behavior clearly comes before the drug use.
Those other studies don't have, you know, we don't really know the direction of
causality. They're also all about adults which isn't
really relevant here cuz we're talking about children.
So one option and, and you'll see in my next way that I edit it in my next slide
is that you could actually delete all that information about the adult sex.
But for now I left it in if they wanted to get that point in there.
And then I broke off into the second paragraph.
Several pathways may explain our findings. Aggressive children may have underlying
psychiatric disorders or cognitive disabilities that increase the risk of
drug use. Misbehavior tends to co-ocur with
impulsivity with increases the risk of drug use.
And childhood misbehavior may lead to long term problems, such as persistent
distress. For failure to ever adopt conventional
worlds of behavior which may be to drug dependence.
You'll notice that second paragraph, I actually used only one single sentence I
used a colon and a list there. That's perfectly okay.
I tried to also clear up a little bit of things, of connections which may be a
little bit confusing in the original example.
So hopefully you were able to make that example a little bit shorter, crisper, and
a little bit clearer. Here's the other alternative that you
could have done. You could have just deleted all of those
adult, adult studies, as I mentioned. And just have the whole paragraph be about
the childhood studies. And then you're say, you're basically
saying previous studies have linked childhood conduct problems with drug use,
subsequent drug use. And path, you hear all the pathways with,
that may explain the link that they found as well, you know, that, as well as what
we found. They also found the same link in their
study. So we can do it that way.
So either of those edits is perfectly fine.
But I am hoping you recognize that there was this change of ideas in the middle of
that paragraph. I just want to give a quick
acknowledgement to your I want to thank Gary Friedman of Stanford University.
He's been a long time advocate of improving the quality of writing in
scientific papers and he's a fantastic editor himself and actually provided with
me a whole treasure trove of examples, some of which have found their way into
this course. The proceeding program is copyrighted by
the Board of Trustees of the Leeland Stanford Junior University.
Please visit us at med.stanford.edu.