Abstruse Goose: On Writing
By Ann Finkbeiner | July 11, 2012 | 4 Comments
Maybe I’ve just been reading too many scientific journals and too many memos from academics but I swear to God when I’m declared empress, my first edict is going to be, “Signal-to-noise! Raise the signal! Lower the noise!”
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4 Responses to “Abstruse Goose: On Writing”
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July 11th, 2012 @ 12:56 pm
Ann -
+1.
Several years ago, I was plowing through a quite technical paper on a policy-relevant question (it involved western US water management). Befuddled, I called the author and asked my usual dumb journalist questions. What I was looking for was the sort of information that could have easily been encapsulated in a nice, user-friendly data table. The paper’s author expressed frustration, because exactly the sort of thing I was looking for had been in an earlier draft of the paper, but had been squeezed out in the peer review process by a demand for more impenetrable nerdiness. Which made the paper less policy-relevant because the non-technical people who might be able to act on the information might not be able to read it.
July 11th, 2012 @ 2:19 pm
John, I can’t imagine why an editor would do something so short-sighted and I wonder how often that kind of thing happens. You must have been very annoyed and the researcher, annoyed beyond tolerance.
July 11th, 2012 @ 11:17 pm
If you cannot explain your idea on the back of my business card, you do not understand your idea.
July 12th, 2012 @ 8:21 am
Also known as the “elevator pitch”.
If you can’t explain your raison d’être by the time it takes to travel between a couple of floors, you haven’t got a grasp on your core business.