Comments inspired by short and medium papers

trivia

• Page numbers on anything you ever write.
• Units are in Roman font with space between number and unit. Hint: view the number as an adjective; then you will insert a space as in 130 g   not 130g and not 130g   (i.e., 130 times variable g).
• Quotation marks and punctuation. The comma and period aren't strong enough to stand outside quotations marks, regardless of meaning. Thus ⇒    I say "Always take the period or comma inside the quote."
  
  But meaning sets place of strong colon, question and bang. Thus
    ⇒I say "Shouldn't the question mark be inside the quote?"
    ⇒ Didn't I say "Place the quotation mark by its meaning!"?
• Captalizing elements and their abbreviations. Unless the first word in the sentence, elements are lower case; abbreviations have first letter capitalized. Thus silicon or Si. The font style of abreviations is normal, not italic; thus Mg₂SiO₄, not Mg₂SiO₄ nor Mg₂SiO₄.
• Use emphasis sparingly. When using italics or bold face or underline,
  1. Use only one form at a time. Use one emphasis is o.k., but use many emphases and use many emphases are not.
  2. Use sparingly, no more than a few words, not whole lines or paragraphs. To do so is like screaming. Done in short bursts it might be effective; if you persist for minute or more, most will think you have lost control (and you have).

Serious

• Word choice is important. Failure to select the most appropriate word made prose confusing, ineffective, and sometimes actively misleading.
• Figures are active characters; don't hide them. Thus
     ⇒ Figure 1 proves the eye is mighter than the pen.
     ⇒Not: It can be seen the pen is puny beside the picture (Figure 1).
• Dangling participles or the errant gerund.
     Not: Walking the beach, the sun rose.
     Not: Using a crowbar, the sealed box opened.
     Not:Turning the corner, Barrett suprised us.
     But: Turning the corner, we bumped into Wilkins.
     O.K. Considering the hour, it is surprising Bob came. [The participle has morphed into a preposition.]

Turning wordy vagueness into terse specifics

Beginnings and Endings

A common and, if used well, effective ploy is an introduction relevant to some current event. This suggestion often falls on deaf ears as may this one. But, not giving up, I suggest another intro gimick: the clinch-ending that ties the end to the beginning.

Intro: Remember learning in school the planets in order from the sun? Did you wonder if you would ever need them. Or worse, that they could turn out to be wrong? ... Since science never has the last word, another planet has been found. ...
 
Ending: ... Eventually some international body will decide the definition of planet and whether there are some beyond Pluto. But you can be sure school children will agree that 10 planets are enough.

Anecdotes too far from the point.

What may work in a longer paper, won't in brief report or newspaper article. Especially if the issue is serious:

Elvira Brown's aging face seems almost to be a map of the parched, weatherbeaten Texas countryside that has been her home for 83 years. Through the eyes that squint in the harsh sunlight, she has seen Dallas grow from a tiny cowtown into a midland capital. The street outside of her tiny house used to be nothing more than a dust trail in summer and a mudhole in winter.
 
Years ago, she would sit on this porch and watch cattle drives pass. Today, a procession of quite a different sort passed along the now-paved course.
 
It was a motorcade. It flew by at top speed on its way to Parkland Memorial Hospital. Top speed because, it seems, the President of the United States was inside. And he was dead.

This was actually used by newspaper at the time. (Shame!)

Topic sentence should be more specific

Not: Many other studies also have shown similar results.
  
But: The North Carolina data is supported in California with a solid connection between drunk driving and running the red light and in Ohio with nicotine-deprived bar hoppers gunning the engine when the light turns yellow.

Sample Sentence Outline for 10 minute talk on planned Petascale Computer

1. For more realistic global-climate modeling, the data mesh needs to increase by 10⁴. From the typical 30 points in the US for any altitude to 6000 points; the number of altitude points will increase by by factor of ten. The number of meteorological variables recorded should also increase from 10 to 30 [made these up].
2. Such increases necessitates more than a thousand fold increase in computing -- comparable to the speed up in a single processor in the last quarter century (Moore's law).
3. Parallel computing is the only solution -- dispersing the data set and the computation to thousands of computers (CPUs).
4. Any real parallel computation requires that any grid point (or atoms) knows what has happened on adjacent grid points -- current data must flow quickly from processor to processor.
5. Concomitantly, the program on any processor must itself be speeded up, from a time scaling as a power of the number of mesh point to being linear in the number.
6. Achieving scalable computing -- where each processor runs near its maximum speed and doubling the number of computers doubles the number of mesh point computed in the same real time -- necessitates software enhancements that so far industry cannot meet.

   ---

   To cite this page:
   Comments inspired by short and Medium papers ZZZZbr><http://www.physics.ohio-state.edu/~wilkins/writing/Handouts/vgs/greatneed.html>
   [Tuesday, 14-Feb-2012 16:34:08 EST]
   
   Edited by: wilkins@mps.ohio-state.edu on Sunday, 17-May-2009 17:26:58 EDT