Week 5: Anatomy of a Science Paper, Part 2

Part 2 of our deep-dive into the scientific manuscript. Today, we will continue by talking about the discussion, and will focus especially on the concept of a Topic Sentence and how it relates to good writing.

Lecture Topics

  • Paper sections: Discussion, acknowledgments, and figures and tables
  • Focus: Topic sentences. What are they, and what are they for?
  • Focus: Abstracts

Readings

Please read the Nature guide to abstracts in advance of the lecture.

Also, please download this redacted version of Nagasawa and Tadokoro (1996) and read it. Please don’t go and download the original paper - we are going to write our own abstract for this in class!

Activities

We will introduce a new weekly activity - team-based goal setting. We will do our power 1/4 hr as well.

We will do an activity related to topic sentences. I will provide some paragraphs from papers with the topic sentence removed. In pairs, you will craft topic sentences.

We will wrap up with an abstract activity using the redacted paper above.

We will also introduce a new weekly goal setting activity. An optional template for this is available here.

Lecture slides

Slides available via speakerdeck