We do not start with the strawberry shortcake and work our way up to the broccoli.
This though is a key difference that I have. I prefer at times eating my vegetables last. This is partially because of how much I love them. I wonder if this is true in life too. Like procrastinating!
we delight in being rewarded at the end of a labor with something that makes the ongoing effort worthwhile.
This is true for every fiction book or movie or even joke ever created.
greatly increase that reader and writer will perceive the same material as being worthy of primary emphasis. The very structure of the sentence thus helps persuade the reader of the relative values of the sentence's contents.
I wonder how the structure of our speech does the same and how closely it matches writing.
Unfortunately, the reader will not discover its true value until too late—until the sentence has ended without having produced anything of much value outside of that subject-verb interruption.
Haha, how often has this happened to me, even in watching content that wasn't well thought out or well written.
It does not matter how pleased an author might be to have converted all the right data into sentences and paragraphs
Interesting because with ADHD this is usually all that I am pleased about when I am writing. I am so happy to finally get all of my ideas to flow out of my head.
. We have striven not for simplification but for clarification.
Can we not strive for both. Though one could argue that with greater simplicity one often looses clarity. Likewise with a lack of simplicity one also loses clarity. So I suppose that clarity is about more than simplicity but rather understanding which I think they are both striving for.
when too much experimental detail is found in the Results section, or when discussion and results intermingle—readers are often equally confused.
I am guilty of doing things like this. Maybe it is because like the next sentence states I am more used to smaller sections of discourse like passing conversations and quippy youtube videos, also this may be what I am more prone to because of my ADHD.
Writing with the Reader in Mind
This is a principle of good design. Designs with the user in mind are more widely used, favored, and adopted for longer periods of time.
Improving the quality of writing actually improves the quality of thought.
This message hits hard and true, I think that part of why I fear writing is that I fear having my thoughts exposed. They are not always complete in their nature. I can speak my way through mistakes as conversations are usually a bit more forgiving. I would love to spend more time doing it however to improve at it and have it be one of my greatest strengths one day!
When the Voice of Britain is heard at nine o’clock, better far and infinitely less ludicrous to hear aitches honestly dropped than the present priggish, inflated, inhibited, school-ma’amish arch braying of blameless bashful mewing maidens!
This whole paragraph, but especially this highlighted portion, is itself inspired by Shakespeare. I find that such writing is much easier to handle when one has grown accustomed to it.
bestial horror at the rising tide of the mass revolutionary movement, have turned to acts of provocation, to foul incendiarism, to medieval legends of poisoned wells, to legalize their own destruction of proletarian organizations, and rouse the agitated petty-bourgeoise to chauvinistic fervor on behalf of the fight against the revolutionary way out of the crisis.
This paragraph made sense right up to all of this.
3. On the one side we have the free personality: by definition it is not neurotic, for it has neither conflict nor dream. Its desires, such as they are, are transparent, for they are just what institutional approval keeps in the forefront of consciousness; another institutional pattern would alter their number and intensity; there is little in them that is natural, irreducible, or culturally dangerous. But on the other side, the social bond itself is nothing but the mutual reflection of these self-secure integrities. Recall the definition of love. Is not this the very picture of a small academic? Where is there a place in this hall of mirrors for either personality or fraternity?
This is a little closer to how I write. If I had to guess I'd say that the main issue here is that everything is almost too connected. Not unlike a giant run-on sentence.
Above all, we cannot play ducks and drakes with a native battery of idioms which prescribes egregious collocations of vocables as the Basic put up with for tolerate, or put at a loss for bewilder.
This is just speaking in a way that is not asking to be understood. The writer must either be communicating with people who are used to using and reading a multitude of needlessly large words.
I am not, indeed, sure whether it is not true to say that the Milton who once seemed not unlike a seventeenth-century Shelley had not
Yeah, four not's in a row is pretty confusing. I hope and don't think that we do this too often as a society. I do wonder though if this is how we think more often than not.
If the paper is vital to my research—and if it is theoretical—I would reinvent the paper.
Wow, what a way to take detailed notes huh? I might have to do this with vital work as well. Restating things in my own way is time-consuming but a bit part of understanding something.
Then I read the entire article, leaving the methods to the end unless I can't make sense of the results or I'm unfamiliar with the experiments.
I think that this is an interesting strategy and I am going to have to give it a try. It seems that the primary audience for these works is just concerned with the information that is presented and much less with how it is presented and even less with making it presentable to those who aren't steeped in the field. This makes learning about anything scientific or research-based for the first time dreadful and I wonder if this will change over the coming years.
the supplementary figures
Are they talking about graphs and charts here? So it is easier to understand a scientific paper by reading a chart or graph out of context first than by reading the paper that should be describing the chart?
it helps me to have a writing task
I get the same way when taking notes. I need a task to focus on what otherwise would be boredom. I want to be better at this.
I start by reading the abstract. Then, I skim the introduction and flip through the article to look at the figures. I try to identify the most prominent one or two figures, and I really make sure I understand what's going on in them. Then, I read the conclusion/summary. Only when I have done that will I go back into the technical details to clarify any questions I might have.
So what you are saying is that in order to read a scientific article the easiest order is out of order?
reading scientific papers becomes easier with experience
Yeah, maybe doctorate-level experience. In honesty though I do believe that it is possible to understand this stuff earlier I don't think it is "easy" until you have been working in reading them for years.
sometimes our subdiscipline is so hyperspecific that we need a million acronyms.
This is why reading the book range was so empowering to me, because it helped me realize that I communicate better by braking genre-specific acronyms down into broader ideas that everyone can understand and drawing them through that at the beginning of my papers. Still, I don't think that writing these kinds of papers alone is at all for me. Maybe with a team but not alone. Maybe not ever alone.
You'd call it a badly written article.
The reason newspaper articles like this don't exist is that people wouldn't read them.
But I'd read the damn paper!
Sometimes it seems that this is all the instructor cares about. I especially struggle to read things because of my ADHD, so I often give it my best shot but find it discouraging when the letter of the assignment seems more important than the spirit of it.