THE ENGLISH CLASS THROUGH MY EYES

I came late to class today…those how know me will not find this strange (I’m often late…maybe it has something to do with my origins…”Mauritian time” some will say). Because of that, I missed the beginning of the lesson.  I quickly took on the teacher’s table the handouts the class was working on and I tried to catch up on Guillaume.

The exercise was on new idiomatic expressions and I can summaries the exercise in the table below: 

Mrs. Anne asked if we knew the difference between a summary and an abstract! Seeing that we were hesitating, she started explaining a few things:

A magazine: those who write in a magazine are journalists and they write articles. The audience of magazines is the general public (the common people)

A journal: scientists write papers in a journal. They submit the paper and it is reviewed by peers. The readers of journals are specialists.

An abstract: an abstract is found at the beginning of a journal. The targeted readers here are non specialists. (Same audience as an article)

I thought that papers and articles were synonyms! I was wrong and I made an error in my former post.

 Here is what I wrote:

After that, we were given other articles to read in groups of 4. My group read one entitled ‘deposition improves medical implants’. The exercise here was different, we had to pick the relevant points from the paper and present it to the class on the overhead projector afterwards.

Since it is an article that we read I should have used again article instead of paper!

Our teacher also related a funny story about two scientists: Sokal and Bricmont who wrote a paper in the social text journal. It turned out that what they wrote was total rubbish!! The purpose of this hoax was to see if a fake paper that sounds correct and was written in the editors’ ideology could be published without being reviewed by peers.  I have to say I did not understand what was funny in it until I read about it on the net.

The exercise that followed was about abstracts. We were distributed a handout on which we could learn the order of typical elements included in an abstract:

 Bearing this order in mind, we could analyse two abstracts written by two scientists.

The first one was clear and easy to read. It was written in the correct order and thus could be considered as a good one whereas the second one was messy! It had too much information given in the wrong order.

I did not know why but while reading those two abstracts, something bothered me. Now after having thought about it and visited the website where the abstracts can be found, I can figure out what it was! Those two abstracts were real one written by real Scientifics as an introduction to seminars! Isn’t it shocking that a lot of Scientifics do not know how to write properly and are they aware of that?

At the end of the academic year, most of us will do a training course and will have to submit a report! And next year the ‘master thesis’ awaits us!! Unfortunately, in our scientific formation, there is no place for a course showing us how to write papers, reports, theses or even simple things like practical work reports… It is true that the main activity of scientists is to deal with formulas, numbers, and all that but writing is also part of the job!
Must we really learn how to write by ourselves? Isn’t there a book or a method to follow?  Are we doomed to write unreadable reports as students and in our future unclear papers?