I’m all for startling sentences –
and, given how lazy some reviewers are, put it in the title if you can! To use
the Kent Beck example
“Network Garbage Collection: Fast
and Easy!”
Would make a fine title, and note that it
contains a colon in the title. Papers with colons in the title are cited more.
When I first heard this, I was dubious. One day I happened to have a
spreadsheet with all the papers in our university’s ePrints system which
included bibliometric data, so I put it to the test and, yes, it seems to be
quite true. The titles-with-colons were indeed a lot more cited on average than
those without. Why? I don’t know, but I have a few theories – it’s
probably a worthy subject for research!
But, back to startling sentences. It’s
a common technique used in lots of forms of writing to grab and hold the reader’s
attention from the first sentence (so they will buy the book or whatever) –
it’s usually called “the hook” if you are googling (as in
fishing for a reader). “The past is another country; they do things
differently there”, “Last night I dreamt I went to Mandalay again”
and the all-time classic “It was a dark and stormy night” (a hook
now so famous thanks to Snoopy that nobody even remembers the book).The use of “the
hook” is well-known but not it seems in academic writing for which the
gold standard is to be as boring as possible J
Kerry
From:
Ward Cunningham [mailto:ward@c2.com]
Sent: Thursday, 8 November 2012
10:10 AM
To: Research into Wikimedia
content and communities
Cc: kerry.raymond@gmail.com
Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l]
Unaffiliated researchers
I always liked Kent Beck's patterns for a successful oopsla submission,
especially "one startling sentence":
This was from a time that oopsla was big and important. It was also a
conference that actively sought industry collaboration. Notice that all of the
panelists were from industry.
On Nov 7, 2012, at 3:32 PM, Manuel Palomo Duarte wrote:
I agree with Kerry, unaffiliated are unusual, but I've never heard
of them been discriminated in any way when publishing ...
2012/11/7 Kerry Raymond <kerry.raymond@gmail.com>
I am not an unaffiliated researcher (but I guess I might be after
my imminent retirement). But having been involved in editorial boards and
conference programme committees etc, I have never been aware of any restriction
on unaffiliated researchers publishing research. I would say though that it is
fairly unusual to receive papers from unaffiliated authors and I think the
couple of times I have encountered the situation the papers were very poor
quality. But they were reviewed in the normal way and rejected on their merits.
But had the papers been of better quality, then I presume they would have been
accepted. On what basis could a reviewer or editor legitimately discriminate
against unaffiliated authors?
Kerry
From: wiki-research-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org
[mailto:wiki-research-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of emijrp
Sent: Wednesday, 7 November 2012
9:12 PM
To: Research into Wikimedia
content and communities
Subject: [Wiki-research-l]
Unaffiliated researchers
Hi all;
I wonder if there are unaffiliated researchers in this mailing list. I know
that publishing without affiliation is a bit hard, so I would like to talk with
them and learn from their experience.
Regards,
emijrp
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- The wiki search engine
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