hmmmm

[stellar_muddle]

Attempting to (re)write a paper in the vague hope that it might be published. Several things spring to mind:

• Journal articles range in style from "understandable and not too bad" to "umm, what are you paying the editor to do" to "huh??? what did you try to say?". The writing was far more clear and concise in about the 1930s and earlier.
  
• Having whinged about what others write, I don't write science well. I range from the too colloquial to the impenetrably long sentenced. The less said about the spelling the better too.
  There is a 328 page thesis out there which supports this fact... but it did pass...
  
• I am also bad at editing my work. Having sweated over getting the words out to express the concepts, I just want to leave them and get things out of the way.
  

But

• 80% of the people who will ever read my thesis have already done so. So it's 4 years of work wasted if it isn't published.
  
• There are some nice results there and some stuff I think is really cool and other people studying in the field really need to know.
  
• Publish or perish... Work prides itself on an average publication rate of 1 paper per academic per year... and it is now just over a year...
  

So write I must...
With a brief pause for morning tea, sunshine and watching the cockatoo on the window ledge - ok, so they are fun to watch perambulating.

Comments

[alpha-angel.livejournal.com]

You can pass bits to me, you know.
It might be gobbledegook to me, but I can make it grammatical gobbledegook!

[stellar-muddle.livejournal.com]

Warning - have taken you up on that.
Sent pdf copy to your home account on Fri afternoon.
Happy reading, hacking, slicing and dicing...

[alpha-angel.livejournal.com]

Send it to my work account. It won't take anytime to download and I can chuck it on my flash drive to take home.

[manus.livejournal.com]

Have you read "Small World" by David Lodge? -- It covers the publish or perish dilemma you mention :-)