Interlude: Blooming Drafts, Flawed Advice, and Linguistic Shifts
Earlier this week, I was walking my dog and stopping to smell the roses along the way. I grew up with lots of rose bushes in the yard, and my mom would make rose petal jelly, so I always enjoy the nostalgia of smelling a fresh blossom.
After smelling a particularly fragrant rose, I thought about how developing a draft relates to growing roses. I think the process is quite similar.
The central message is like the seed. Just like the seed is essential for a rose bush to grow, the central message is the essence of the story in the draft.
The outline is like the roots. We can't see the roots grow beneath the surface, but we know they are important to create a solid foundation for the rose bush to grow. Similarly, an outline creates a solid foundation for a story before we can really see the text take shape into a draft.
The first draft is like the stems of the rose bush. The stems grow up from the foundation of roots, and we can start to see a bush emerge. Similarly, a first draft is when the outline gets formed into paragraphs, and we can start to see the draft emerge.
The subsequent drafts are like the leaves of the rose bush. Just like the leaves show signs of liveliness, the refinements made during later drafts start to bring the text to life.
Then the final draft is like the rose. For the rose bush, all the steps to this point culminate to form a beautiful rose. For the draft, all the steps to this point culminate to form an impactful draft—the draft blooms.
I love this idea of a blooming draft. I think it helps to reframe writing from a daunting task to a beautiful blossoming.
Now onto this week's round-up...
💌 Round-up
💻 From My Desk
Why "The Best" Scientific Writing Advice Fails (and What Works Instead)
Many scientists and clinicians are advised to mimic what they read in the literature. Although this advice is well-intended, it has fundamental flaws that contribute to poor scientific and medical writing. In this video, you’ll learn why mimicking published papers is not the path to clear, impactful writing—and what you should do instead.
👓 Reading
Examining linguistic shifts in academic writing before and after the launch of ChatGPT: a study on preprint papers
"…the results indicate a significant increase in the proportion of LLM-preferred words in abstracts, revealing the widespread influence of LLMs on academic writing. Additionally, we observed an increase in lexical complexity and sentiment in the abstracts, but a decrease in syntactic complexity, suggesting that LLMs introduce more new vocabulary and simplify sentence structure. However, the significant decrease in cohesion and readability indicates that abstracts have fewer connecting words and are becoming more difficult to read.”
False authorship: an explorative case study around an AI-generated article published under my name
"The findings highlight the risks posed by AI-generated and misattributed research articles, which threaten the credibility of academic publishing. Ways to mitigate these issues include strengthening identity verification mechanisms for DOIs and ORCIDs, enhancing AI detection methods, and reforming research assessment practices. Without effective countermeasures, the unchecked growth of AI-generated content in scientific literature could severely undermine trust in scholarly communication.”
Fraudulent studies are undermining the reliability of systematic reviews: on the prevalence of problematic images in preclinical depression studies
"…peer-reviewed reports with problematic images are common within the field of preclinical depression studies. We believe that a majority of these reports had been, in part or completely, fabricated or falsified…The consequences of our findings are concerning. Any preclinical systematic review and meta-analytical investigation carried out in this field will potentially be misled by fraudulent studies.”
💬 Quote
“Tell the readers a story! Because without a story, you are merely using words to prove you can string them together in logical sentences.” –Anne McCaffrey
Thank you so much for reading.
Warmly,
Crystal
