Carl Sagan on Writing

Follow me....

Blogger recently changed its user interface and one of the unique features that are now more accessible to its users is "Stats". According to the "Stats", this blog has had over 1300 page views. This indicates to me that people might be actually using the blog with their writing. If you are a frequent visitor to this blog I highly encourage you to become a follower. To become a follower, simply click on the "Follow" button near the search bar on the top left of the page. Once you are a follower you are able to receive updates on new posts. Now might be an opportune time to (re)iterate what I hope to provide by publishing this blog and how I distinguish this blog from other blogs and writing websites. The overall goal of this blog is to provide an indexed guide to PhD writing misunderstandings. Is this a new thing? No. This blog is a aggregation of various helpful writing guides. It is specifically catered towards the writing I do in pursuit of my PhD. Because I am a PhD student (now a candidate) at a large North American university, I think that a least a portion of these writing misunderstandings are at the "PhD-level", while certainly not being exclusive to that level. I made this blog public because perhaps I have aggregated information that will clear up a writing misunderstanding. I did not start this blog for some altruistic reason to help PhD students who have difficulty writing. In actuality, I merely wanted to catalogue all of the writing misunderstandings that I go through so that I do not do them again and subsequently get yelled at by my supervisor. A blog provides the ideal template to catalogue these misunderstandings by way of the search bar that I highly encourage you to use. If you cannot find what you are searching for on my blog, which I highly encourage you to consider as a starting point by becoming a follower, here is a short list of helpful writing blogs and websites that I frequent: Grammar Girl, Purdue Online Writing Lab (OWL), and Explorations of Style. A final question, when will this blog come full circle? I believe it already has. In fact, I used my own blog in a separate tab to look up the difference between thus, therefore, and thereby to write this post. Thus, this blog has come full circle. For some funny commentary on the merits of aggregating information see the Colbert's interview with Huffington Post founder Arianna Huffington on 4/18/12. Video can be found here for US viewers and here for Canadian viewers. Apparently I have a lot of readers from New Zealand, so in effort to get you to follow my blog if you are from New Zealand here is a picture of Hobbiton from the Lord of the Rings series filmed in New Zealand.

Source: http://www.traveljournals.net/pictures/34305.html

Posters! Glorious glorious posters!

Making posters is a lot of work, but is so much fun. When else do you get to put your graphic design skills from grade 8 to use? It is probably the only time in your graduate career when you actually get to be creative. Colors, shapes, its all coming back to me........

But I have definitely seen my fair share of color clashes, ppt slides pasted together to resemble a poster, and graphs persons with color blindness could not read at the last conference I went to. If you need some helpful tips and tricks to a creating a great poster, check out this blog. If you are me and make awesome posters, then go get yourself a coke.

Analytical Essay

We have all done it. I did it this morning. I cleaned the whole house. I emptied the litter box. I took a long breakfast. Anything to avoid having to start writing. While getting in front of the screen to type is hard, it becomes even harder when you don't have any guidelines or know what your superiors want. I have learned that knowing your audience and determining the type of essay that is expected of you is equally as hard as the physical writing.

What type of essay should I write? That should be determined by the kinds of questions that your superior wants you to answer. I kept writing a summary of a meeting for my superior, when in fact she wanted a analytical essay of the meeting. How did I know she wanted an analytical essay? After handing her the second summary, she went down a list of the types of questions she wanted answered. They were:
-What is the motivation?
-What did the meeting tell me?
-Did everyone agree?
-What are the issues?
-What are the open questions?
-What were the key themes?
-What was revealed?
-Was there anything that was not anticipated?
-Did anything new surface?

After getting down the kinds of questions my superior wanted. It was a simple task to determine the type of essay she wanted. I thought that she might want something like an op-ed, where my voice came through and my perspective on the issues were presented. At second glance of the questions and this website, I found that she wanted more towards a analytical essay.

It always helps to have a template to work from when writing. In the case of the analytical essay I choose this one.

What did I learn? When confused about how to do something, go back to the question.