Category Archives: Writing

Writing

Request for Critiques

I would like to improve my blog writing. As far as I know, my English is generally correct. While I welcome grammatical and spelling corrections, I am seeking critiques of my writing style specifically. I’ve read a few books on how to improve one’s writing style, and I have subscribed to some blogs that espouse ways of improving one’s writing, but what really matters is how my readers feel about my writing.

After discussing this with my wife (my first critiquing recruit), what I’m specifically looking for are answers to these questions:

  • What percentage of the posts on this site do you read in their entirety? Rough estimates (say, to the nearest 25%) are fine.
  • Why do you skip or just skim some posts?
  • If you are reading a post and suddenly lose interest, do you know why? Too much jargon? Train of thought too hard to follow? If you are so generous as to volunteer some critiques, please pay special attention to this in the future, and comment on the relevant post when it happens.

What have you noticed?

Finding related articles graphically

When doing a literature search, it’s a good idea to start from a few articles and then (if they are along the lines of what you are looking for) use their references and articles that reference them to expand the search.

One handy way of doing that is with the HubMed Graph Browser. You get to it by finding an article (like mine here) and then selecting the “Graph” link next to “Related” in the line of options at the bottom.

Once you load the TouchGraph, you can see the related articles, change the depth of relationships graphed, zoom in and out, and so on. It can be a nice alternative to the normal related articles list, graphically showing distance and relation.

PubCasts and SciVee

Have you noticed that everything is named in CamelCase these days? Anyway…

I’ve had a couple of conversations with Dr. Rachel Karchin here at the ICM regarding Open Access scientific publishing, and PLoS specifically. Last week, she forwarded an email to me regarding PubCasts on SciVee. (Example here.)

A “PubCast” is basically the same thing as a “SlideCast“. (Have you noticed that everything is named with “Cast” at the end lately, all spawned from the term “Broadcast” and made popular by “PodCast”?) Let’s start with a SlideCast. The idea with a SlideCast is that presentations are not composed merely of speaking or merely of slides. Many people make their presentations in such a way that the slides stand on their own, but these are typically awful presentations. They’re just slide-formatted outline notes. A good presentation requires the visuals and spoken commentary. In a SlideCast, slides with their various animations and transitions are shown with an audio narration by the presenter. PubCasts go one step further and actually include video of the presenter speaking along with the slides. They also preferably include the paper. I think the video is probably not necessary, unless it’s video of the person presenting in front of the actual slides, but that requires green screening or extremely high quality video (for the slides to be readable), both not worth the hassle.

On the whole, I think PubCasts are an excellent idea. A proper scientific presentation should get the audience engaged by getting them emotionally involved, making them see why they should be interested, while a paper gives all of the gory details. In this way, you get both together. How often do you have the paper handy to follow along when watching a scientific presentation? In my experience, pretty much never. People usually present the stuff they’re working on, not the stuff they’ve published (background excepted).

Unfortunately, I don’t have any true Open Access papers yet. My paper that’s supposed to come out next month will not be Open Access, as the fee from the publisher for it was outrageous, and I couldn’t really justify it to my advisor. Nonetheless, I already have a slide deck put together for the paper, and have presented it, so in the near future I’m planning to do a SlideCast of it and post it here on the blog.

Rob explains Calculus

If you’re one of the 60% of the population that never took Calculus, but want to find out what it’s all about, check out my friend Rob’s Calculus Tutorial. His goal is to make it understandable in a short period of time for a layperson, and he would really appreciate your feedback if you can’t quite get it after reading.

Cardiac Vulnerability to electric shocks during phase 1A of acute global ischemia

Per the SHERPA RoMEO project, it is permitted to self-publish or archive scientific articles from the Heart Rhythm Journal.

As such, I have completed the layout of the only HR article on which I am an author, and published it here. The final version of the article as laid out by Heart Rhythm is available here, if you happen to have access.