Well, that wasn’t toooo hard. After 3 years at university of being told I was unable to write in a sufficiently academic style and insisting on stooping to pop science this comes as rather a pleasant surprise. It would be nice to believe I had “cracked it” but I suspect that it had rather a lot to do with the fact that my co – nay - second author has one of the most poppy styles of writing I have come across – and frankly its amazing, but reassuring, that he gets away with it. He has a clear belief in clear and interesting content over obfuscating jargon. And that is an exception I can tell you. For example, he has changed my abstract to be more poppy!
I quote:
“When evolving Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) to perform multiple tasks, are there advantages in tackling this one bit at a time, through incremental evolution?”
“one bit at a time” ? Das ist poppy
Another piece of my own advice, which I failed to heed fully, and paid the price, as I knew that I would – is to write the piece IN THE TEMPLATE THEY WANT. And that means all of it not just most. Why so you may ask? Surely you can just past in your text into the template and it will all flow in and be lovely. Not if it’s in columns (and it always is) and has diagrams (it will have).
Columns and diagrams are like cats and dogs – they just don’t get on and 1000 years of human evolution hasn’t changed that.
Actually, we seem to have gone backwards – the Ancient Egyptians had cracked laying out columns of little pictures 5000 years ago. Try pasting the walls of King Tut’s tomb into Word 2007 for Vista and see how far you get..
Filed under: Academic
