2024-10 月記
This is just a memo for me, but this stack exchange really surprised me.
https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/37791
It says we should not use “f: A \to B” but “f\colon A to B”. The spacing around the colon will differ. I never noticed that the spacing needed to be corrected.
The following is the regular expression to find such colons.
(?<!\b(?:sec|ssec|fig|ref|alg|eq|https)):
Academic Writing
Recently, I’ve been writing a thesis for my master’s program, and I wanted to systematically re-learn academic writing, so I bought and read books about it.
A New Introduction: Academic Writing
I mistook this book for being written for all students, but it turned out that it is for humanities students. Nevertheless, it was still useful for me in some sense.
In particular, Chapters 9 and 10, where the author presents his philosophy about research, were really impressive. He says that the ultimate goal of humanities (人文学) is the social revolution. He asserts that any kind of violence is evil, and humanities are devoted to correcting such violence, inequality, and disparity. The motivation for his research seems to be joining and contributing to such academic activity, which is quite convincing and resembles my motivation to do scientific research.
Anyway, I’d like to summarize with quotation and interpret the contents of Chapters 1 to 8 for my research in the following.
In Chapter 1, the author defines the thesis as “an article to prove an argument.”
What I felt most important is that the argument must be “some assertion which requires proof, not just observations or facts, and be presented under the author’s responsibility.”
This statement holds true not only for humanities but also for science. We need to clarify the theorem or statement at the beginning of the paper, and we should pay attention to whether it satisfies the condition above. In particular, when we state our main result in the introduction section, I tend to fail to meet the conditions. Consciousness of the “argument” would lead to better scientific sentences.
In Chapter 2, the author discusses the quality of the argument. He says that the argument must have some academic value, and its value can be defined by whether the current academic “conversation” can be updated by your argument. In science, it is often referred to as the novelty (新規性) of the research. Such literary expression (update the conversation) is relatively fresh and exciting. Actually, there was no word “新規性” in this book. This might be one of the significant differences between humanities and science. Novelty might not always be required in the humanities because the ultimate goal is the social revolution, as the author said. To revolve society, we only need to point out the drawbacks and update people’s values or ways of thinking, not giving completely new ideas. Thus, according to him, the thesis (in humanities) does not necessarily require the research question. What is needed is just the academic value of the argument. I don’t know whether this holds true for science, but this statement was intriguing.
Chapter 3 (about paragraph writing) resembles the statement in another book I read, so I skip this part.
In Chapter 4, the author introduces “Uneven U” by Eric Hayot.
I’ve never heard the “Uneven U”, but it was convincing. Such a structure would be better even in a scientific thesis. The tweet below resembles this “Uneven U”. Indeed, I wrote my abstract with references to this.
https://twitter.com/slavov_n/status/1847950639202279554
I want to pay attention to such abstraction levels from now on when I read and write theses.
In Chapter 5, the author claims that a long paragraph with abundant information and para-phrase is better. However, this is not a good fit for a science thesis. The correctness or persuasiveness in science is apparent from the math equations or logic. Making the paragraph longer might spoil such clearance. However, adding information and para-phrases to smooth the logic enough would be helpful advice when reviewing the previous works. Stating the previous works with an appropriate abstraction level in your own words might enhance the state’s persuasive power.
I will also skip Chapters 6 (citation) and 7(intro) since they differ from my situation, but they were interesting because of the difference between humanities and science.
In Chapter 8, I was most impressed by the statement: “The conclusion is the only section in which we can embed something not only internal to the thesis but also transcends the thesis.” Of course, we cannot embed something too unclear or false transcending statements in the conclusion section. However, we can still mention future works that broaden our research possibilities. Expressing this fact as above is quite stunning.
Paragraph Writing for Scientists
This book was also beneficial for me. An important part of this book is summarized well in Chapter 2. The index is as follows:
2-2 Topic Sentences
Common problems that occur when writing topic sentences
No Controlling idea exists
No topic exists
Contains unnecessary information
Lacks abstraction (e.g., specific numbers)
Lacks independence (i.e., begin the paragraph with “However, Also, Additionally, … ”)
2-3 Support
Functions of support
Explain the topic sentence in detail
Give examples of topic sentences
Give reasons/evidence for the topic sentence
Common problems that occur when writing support
Not supporting all of the content contained in the topic sentence
States what is not included in the topic sentence
Ignores the order in which information is arranged in the topic sentence
Not working support
Inconsistent support
2-4 Conclusion Sentences
Common problems that occur when writing a concluding sentence
Same sentence to the topic sentence
Contains information not written in the paragraph
Anyway, the most important thing is that “One Idea to One Paragraph.” When I checked my writing from this perspective, I found that I was breaking this rule and made mistakes listed in the abovementioned index. It was really helpful to improve the quality of my thesis.
Another reference for my academic writing came from Twitter this month.
This PDF was also for humanity students but quite interesting.
https://twitter.com/dicekk/status/1847611067960303679
The following tweets were also helpful for me.
https://twitter.com/hkubota_lecture/status/1846683881426264288
https://twitter.com/otakazu/status/1846748332179574863
https://twitter.com/go_over_Neumann/status/1847293821689970836
and this.
https://twitter.com/zooooooo_tmu/status/1848884750595068272
Book
I began to read “The Elegy of Whiteness” by Han Kang, who won this year’s Novel prize.
I still can not judge whether this book is interesting to me, but its quite literary phrasing (I’m not sure if this was due to Han Kang herself or the translator’s too-literal translation) was both annoying and interesting.
I’ll read through this book by the end of the following month.
Recently, I have begun to understand this kind of discourse. Although many researchers criticized this statement, I felt it was somehow suggestive. I want to, or have to, be one of the 20% of researchers.