My research paper is too short

Time: less than 3 you habitually write copy that’s shorter than you want or need, here are some tips on how to lengthen word count…. There is evidence that doodling prods our brains into sure you’ve conducted enough research. Your writing may be too short because you don’t have enough information to share. Some writers feel overwhelmed by the pressure of deadlines and force themselves to start getting words on paper as soon as possible. My finished column is exactly 737 do you stretch out your text if what you’ve written is too short?

Please, scroll down to the comments section, directly underneath the “more from my site” links, and deliver: the art of speech to switch your writing short sentence as gospel truth. I guess that one thing that distinguishes the “write long” to the “write short” is the context in which they write. I usually brainstorm, write a ruff draft, then do research, and finally clean up and post. Up for my free power writing newsletter and you’ll get a free e-booklet on g time: less than 3 you habitually write copy that’s shorter than you want or need, here are some tips on how to lengthen word count…. The convergence of two things spurred me to write this post – one (at least on the surface) just fun; the other, a recent conversation i had about trends in modern , the fun thing: i came across what seems to be a competition to write the shortest possible abstract, and then to one-up that one, the shortest possible paper.

Fold longer than their original 4-word submission*:These authors deliberately intended this to set a record for the shortest published paper**, and were annoyed with an editorial suggestion that “a line or two of explanation would really help”. And the editor consented to publish it as “boxed filler” – but moved the original title into the body of the paper, apparently without conway and soifer’s , here’s the thing. Even the authors seem to recognize there was more to say, as they reprinted their “paper” in geombinatorics but added that the equilaterality of the triangles is important to the result, with n2 + 1 sufficing for some non-equilateral triangles. Guess it’s hard to blame any of these authors, since there’s something irresistibly, geekily cool about publishing a 2-word abstract or a 4-word paper (or even a 30-word one). The papers i’ve discussed so far are extreme outliers – the 4 shortest i know of the millions of papers that make up our literature.

A friend of mine was bemoaning the fact that letters-format journals, with their shorter papers, have been proliferating and climbing in impact factor. Some of our “traditional” journals, like ecology, are deliberately echoing this trend, reducing page limits or pushing more papers into “reports” formats. There are some good reasons for this trend, the most obvious being that the flood of manuscripts we’re producing just keeps growing, putting pressure on journals to publish shorter papers (and hence more of them****) and on us as scientists to read shorter ones (and hence more of them). My friend’s objection was that when he writes a paper, he wants to put into it all his thoughts on a question, and to show all the complexity in his data, but that short-paper formats don’t allow friend is someone i enjoy arguing with, so i told him he was wrong: reducing a complex dataset to a simple story is part of a scientific writer’s job, and that nobody needs to know every thought he’s had about his data. I like to read short papers even if i don’t like having to write them, and my writing book pays a lot of attention to story-finding and brevity.

Writing short papers is harder than writing long ones, and so as writers, we generally need pushing to shorten things up (the roughly 1,000 manuscripts i’ve seen as a reviewer and an editor provide data to support that statement). In other words, i worry that the length that optimizes a paper’s probability of publication, readership, and citation rate may be shorter than the length that optimizes its communicative function. As the american naturalist says, a paper should be as long as it needs to be, but no longer. I’ll add to that: a paper should be as short as it can be, but no shorter. The trick, of course, is figuring out which papers just aren’t right for the fashionable short-paper formats – and finding a way that these longer papers can still be published and draw readership.

There may not be that many papers that genuinely need to be long, but the ones that do might be important. Perhaps we should all agree to cite at least one long paper (presumably after reading it first) in each manuscript we write? Not counting this, which is unbeatable, but which is entirely a joke (as distinct from a paper about real science that makes a joke). In addition, online journals care about impact as much as print ones do, and if we avoid reading long papers, even online journals will avoid publishing this:click to share on twitter (opens in new window)share on facebook (opens in new window)click to share on linkedin (opens in new window)click to share on reddit (opens in new window)click to share on google+ (opens in new window)moreclick to share on tumblr (opens in new window)click to share on pinterest (opens in new window)click to email (opens in new window)click to print (opens in new window)click to share on pocket (opens in new window)like this:like loading... 27**5+84**5+110**5+133** if a picture is indeed worth 1000 words the triangle tiling paper is not even in the ked by 2 people.

Short papers is easy if the topic is trivial enough (steve’s examples in the blog). The danger to science is that ‘short’ is equated to ‘modern’, such that people won’t address large messy issues (pretty much everything in an ecosystems approach). Economy doesn’t mean short; however, it does, as am nat suggests, mean long enough. Consider the 10s-to-100s of antecedent papers going into a typical science or nature paper) but they are not definitive, just illustrative. Papers may not benefit non-specialists and interdisciplinary research scientists those who want to relate the results to their fields as you mention; i vote for having more pictorial illustrations and good editing.

Does+the+one+dimensional+ising+model+show+intermittency&btng=&hl=en&as_sdt=0% an old comment thread over at dynamic ecology:The data is the title, the paper is one short sentence, and the acknowledgments are favourite shortest paper candidate is janzen’s “yes? Biotropica 10:311) – which i believe was submitted as a response to a challenge to publish the shortest scientific unately, when it was typeset “yes? Came immediately after an entirely independent paper by schubart and anderson (schubart and anderson(1978) why don’t ants visit flowers? Janzen biotropica 10:310-311) responding to completely different janzen paper ((janzen dh (1977) why don’t ants visit flowers? Short extracts may be posted as links to this y i participate in the amazon services llc associates program, an affiliate advertising program, and its equivalent at .

D bloggers like this:How to make an essay longer without writing useless er you’re writing an essay for a class, to get into your dream school, or for some other reason besides “just for the heck of it,”  you usually need to write a minimum number of words or while there are probably topics you could write about forever — an ode to your pillow or your deep, unabashed love for nineties sitcoms, for instance — there will be times when you simply run out of things to say before you reach your target word what do you do when you feel as though you’ve squeezed out every last word you can say about your topic, but your essay falls short of your goal? When you’re staring down a hefty page requirement, there are a few things you can do before you ever start writing to set yourself up for lots of research. Check out these posts on the expository essay outline or 5-paragraph essay outline for strategies you can use for papers of any length). Sometimes, after researching or thinking about your topic and creating an outline, you realize that you still don’t know enough about your topic to draft a complete essay. Discussing a wider range of perspectives,…examining a larger population,…looking at a larger geographic area,…considering a broader time span,And of course all of this planning works best when you start your essay well in advance of the deadline, so don’t happens if you use these strategies and still come up short?

If you turn your paper in electronically, your teacher might adjust the font/margin by default…then you’re totally busted, and your efforts were a total more thing: don’t assume that an assignment with a required number of pages rather than words is a green light to go nuts with simply means that your instructor trusts that you are mature enough to hand in a paper with reasonable margins, a normal-sized font, and so ’t abuse that trust! Ask a trusted friend or a kibin editor to look over your paper and make suggestions about where to add more details or support. Pro tip: for this reason, a lot of writers specifically request that i ask questions while i edit their papers. Depending on the type of essay you’re writing, “support” may include quotations and paraphrased information from research or anecdotes and examples from your own experience. If you’re staring down a deadline, even an hour or two away from your writing will help you revisit it with a fresh perspective and — hopefully — some new with the pre-writing and revising strategies outlined in this post, you now know how to make an essay longer and stronger without resorting to fluff, filler, or formatting ‘solutions’ that only waste your time and frustrate your you’re new to writing essays longer than a few pages, check out shawn doyle’s post the five-paragraph fix — how to write longer essays for advice on tackling longer essays and why writing ten pages can eventually become easier than writing just , read these tips for writing longer papers from hamilton college.

This resource provides some great advice for organizing, researching, drafting and revising long essays and research papers so you don’t get stumped in the first ...