FastTrack LIVE #42 | Why good papers get rejected

When a paper gets rejected for "unclear writing" it's rarely the ideas that are the problem. It's the paragraph. The most basic unit of academic writing,  and the most commonly misunderstood.

Tomorrow live I'm walking through our PEER academic writing system. Point. Evidence. Explain. Repeat. Simple framework, but most researchers have never been taught this explicitly.

Once you see it you can't unsee it. Join me tomorrow

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

And how to fix it. Let me start by sharing something that happened recently. I had a researcher from India who had done a very good paper on wildlife reintroduction programs. Solid, it was a great idea, clear gap, interesting question angle, the methods fit, and it came back rejected. And the reviewers said almost pithy, unclear writing, difficult to follow, not a clear contribution. And that was it. Just a few short sentences after months of work. And this is the kind of thing that leads to lots of terrible reviewer memes and frustration and blame the bad reviewers. And look, I I took, as I often do in this role, take a cold, hard, dispassionate look at it, see what's going on. And this kind of thing frustrates me too, because the research was good. It wasn't that the idea was unpublishable. It wasn't even the data or the analysis, but it was the writing. And not writing in the way that some people think. This was a person who English was a second language, but it wasn't the grammar. It wasn't the vocabulary, it wasn't the word choice. It was even more fundamental than that. And today I'm going to show you exactly uh what went wrong with that paper and give you a writing system that you can use, you can apply to your paper today. And this kind of problem where good papers, you may even know it, and you're good, it's like I've got a good paper here, but it keeps getting rejected. Um, this kind of problem is totally fixable and uh completely fixable. And that's the good news. You just need the right system and mental model to do it. I used to blame reviewers all the time, and uh and I've shifted. Instead of pointing the finger at them, I I've started to point the finger at myself now. Uh when that happens, especially if you get comments like, well, unclear, not well written. That's sort of obvious, but others can be more hidden signs, like uh the reviewer says, Well, you know, Professor Stuckler, this paper needed to do X, Y, and Z. I'm like, ah, we actually did X, Y, and Z in the paper. What's wrong with you? Why didn't you see it? It's on this page right here. And you're tempted to write back to the editor, write back to the reviewers, right there, you idiot. You just missed it. Um, but again, this is a fixable problem, and it's a problem of the writing. So, today, what we're gonna cover is uh you need to step back for a second with me and understand how do reviewers actually read your paper and why that's important. Um, and so that's gonna help us go over this failure mode that I see over and over where good papers get rejected. We're gonna introduce some of you are familiar with it, but some of you are new to the channel, might be early stage researchers. This channel is all about helping you publish faster, help avoid these pitfalls that can lead you to get rejected and have it just a much tougher journey. I want you to have a faster, smoother ride uh to publishing success. So I'm gonna introduce our pure writing system. It is the going to give you the anatomy of effective paragraphs. I'm gonna framework that we use inside our fast track programs to help clean up your writing. Um, we're gonna take a paragraph example so you can kind of see a before and after how it works in practice. If we have some time, I'll actually go through some real papers in the literature and show you some examples of the peer system in practice. And by the end of the session, I guarantee you, if you're not familiar with peer already, uh, you're gonna rethink and look at your own writing in a different way uh now and into the future. As ever, uh, we've got your questions. Some of you have submitted some questions through our link. I take these every week on Friday. This is your time. So if you've submitted a question, I'll take a look. We also have some time live in the chat uh to go through that. So uh just saying hey to everybody here. I can see Claudio is joining. Hey Claudio, Amma is saying, uh, I'm Wedding. Welcome, uh, welcome back. Uh I know some of you guys are regulars, so it's always nice to have you with us. Um, so let's step back for a second and and dive in here. So um, you know, a couple first principle. You need to have some sympathy for your reviewers. They're busy, they are doing free work. They're often like me, delegating all their reviews to one big batch, literally a pile of papers. For me, I commonly will print all these out, I'll go on a plane, and I will blast through, no exaggeration, 15 or 20 reviews together. So I'm reading quickly, it could be on a Kindle, a screen, it could be late at night, could be like me on a plane, maybe like with a few glasses of wine in my system already, right? They are not sitting there trying to decipher the Apocrypha. They are trying, they're not gonna sit there and wrestle to try to understand your hidden brilliance that's cryptic. They they just want to get it quickly and confidently. And people have an inherent disposition. If this is too torturous to understand, if it's too hard, maybe something's wrong with it, right? Their viewers are less likely to think, oh, I'm dumb, I don't get it. They're gonna think, well, you just something's wrong with this paper and push it away. Um, so you know, if if they can understand quickly what you did and why it's important and get your methods, and in a way, in their mind, reconstruct your paper, um that they can give you the benefit of the doubt. They can see that the research is solid, that's great. But if not, right, they start having cognitive fatigue. Reading has to do a whole lot of work to understand you. And and second, what happens then is they start losing trust in you, they start losing trust in your authorial authority, and this leads them down the path to reject. And often the reviewers are making pretty a pretty quick decision whether they want to accept or reject the paper, and then they're gonna go through and muster up reasons for or against that decision. If they're doing it in a good way, they're gonna be trying to help you make the better paper better. That doesn't always happen because that takes a whole lot more work to do. And again, this is free volunteer work. Um, so this is why you need to have sympathy for your reviewers because the way you've done your research, you've come to the end of the journey, you have conclusions, you know what you want to say, but you need to meet them where they're at and get them to draw the same conclusions through your research that you've done. And so sometimes that that means unpacking your assumptions and laying things out in a very linear step-by-step way. And when doing that, that is where our peer system for clear writing is going to come into play. Because most of what's going on with the writing that I see is that that it's it's it's not the writing per se, it's the structure of the thinking and how that is laid out inside your paper. So, this is where I'm gonna share a whiteboard and we're gonna go through the peer system, and this is gonna make a whole lot more sense because this thinking structure problem plays out in paragraphs in writing that I see where the point is hard to get, maybe there's two or three different ideas smushed together, concepts, or jumping back and forth concepts without warning. Um, it like I'll show you this in uh this become more concrete as we share. So let me pull up a whiteboard here. So our peer system for writing is kind of like a hamburger in the sense that each paragraph uh is one kind of discrete unit. And this is me trying to draw a hamburger, and that doesn't look very good. Uh yeah, that's that's really bad. Let's let's do it with like a sharpie kind of pen. Oh, nope, that's the wrong color. Let's go black. Okay, oh my days. This is why I shouldn't be using whiteboards. Okay, that looks terrible as well. Okay, well, anyway, this is me attempting rather terribly to draw a burger. All right, this is supposed to be this is really bad. All right, this is supposed to be a bun, guys. Uh, this is a bun, and this is a bun. And imagine this is like, I don't know, this is maybe a mushroom if you're vegetarian, or it's some slab of meat here, and maybe this is kind of your uh lettuce and cheese going on here. Let me try to write. Not very good on the keyboard. Anyway, um, imagine this is like a a paragraph. Okay, in in the paragraph, you want each paragraph to follow a couple a few important principles. One is that you want each days. This uh whiteboard is definitely not cooperating today. Uh I have to zoom way in here to see this. We'll make this bigger in a second. Something called the uh one point rule. So we want each paragraph to make one point no more, no less. And inside your paragraph, that first point or we're gonna talk about is this peer system. So that that point is the P of the peer system. That point is sometimes called a topic sentence, and it's kind of telling your reader what that main point is and what you're gonna deliver in that paragraph. Once you've got that point, you want to back that point up. Now, this is particularly useful for academic writing. We're not trying to write Pulitzer Prizes with some like complicated double key like structure. Simple, clear, concise is what we're going for here. So here you've got maybe your evidence and examples that are gonna back up that point. This can be data that illustrate the point commonly. Uh, and then you've got maybe uh uh you're gonna explain this and go a little bit deeper about what that means. And then you're usually gonna have an R, you're gonna kind of repeat, or you're gonna link this so you create a flow to the next paragraph. So the readers, there's some momentum, the readers see where you're going. And you can think of this in the point is like the top of the bun, the E, and the evidence, and the examples and the explanation. That's all the good stuff inside the burger, and then the R is your repeating point. What makes things very hard for reviewers is when I see paragraphs stuffed, like like the burger is just overstuffed with stuff, and uh it makes it very hard. The reviewers have to do a whole lot of work to figure out what is going on in your paragraph. It's it's cognitively creating more fatigue for them to understand your paper. And you want to make it easy, the whole principle of everything we do, make it easy for the editors to accept, easy for the reviewers to accept and understand. Right? Simplicity here is the ultimate sophistication. The best scientists out there are the ones who can take these complex ideas and make them accessible to the whole world. In fact, that's part of the whole scientific enterprise is taking uh chaos and disorder and creating order and structure out of it. That's for another conversation on philosophy of science. Now, let me give you an example of uh of a paragraph that I kicked together here so that you can see what's going on. So here would be a kind of a paragraph that you might see. And I made this example paragraph about writing. So let's take a paragraph. This is something that it kind of written in a way that I would commonly see. Uh I'll read and take a second to read this with me. I'll see if I can make it a little bit bigger on the screen for you. Um let me see. Okay, hopefully you guys can all all see this here.

unknown 11:36

Uh okay.

SPEAKER_00 11:37

All right, so here we go. Here's a paragraph. And if if I'm looking at this paragraph, you see that it takes a second to read it. I'll read it aloud. Academic writing is a complex skill that many researchers struggle with. There are various reasons why papers get rejected, including unclear writing poor structure. Smith 2020 found that writing quality affects publication rates, is therefore important for researchers to develop strong writing skills in order to see it in academia. Um yeah, that that's uh I hope you guys can see this. You can read this and there's information there, but there's a whole lot going on. It's not like digestible, uh, it's almost like writing's a complex skill, and then papers are getting rejected because of the writing, and then here's an example of how writing affects publication rates, and then so it's just a bit jumbled up. This is hard to follow, not wrong, not necessarily incorrect, just uh really difficult. And and you'll notice about something like this. This is not this is a thinking problem. This is not a writing problem. So whoever writes a paragraph like this can write, can formulate a sentence clearly, but can't package it into a discrete logical unit of our peer hamburger that we want. Uh I hope this makes sense if you can see it. So let me show you an example of how you would fix that because you look at this. What's the point? What's the main point of this paragraph? It doesn't follow the one-point rule. What's what's the evidence? It's kind of buried in the middle, but it's not coming into contact with the topic sentence, it's not really backing up the topic sentence very nicely. And it's just that low-level confusion that that's cognitively taxing. You throw a few of these in your introduction, and your review is already like, uh, this is a too difficult pile, gonna reject this. Well, let's try again. Um, so um let's try again. Let's take something that else I've kicked together and show you an example. And then again, we'll go through the literature and I'll show you some nice uh cases of these paragraphs. Well, I'll go pick up something random. I think that'll also help. So, okay, let's try this. Let me zoom in here. Um, okay, let's try this. Poor writing structure is a primary cause of avoidable paper rejections. Smith et al. 2020 found that 60% of desk rejections cited clarity of argument as a decisive factor, even when the underlying research was rated as methodologically sound. This suggests that reviewers are making judgments about the research quality based on how clearly it's communicated, not just what is being communicated. Addressing writing structure therefore is not just complex semantic, but uh it is one of the most direct levers researchers have for improving their publication rate. Okay, I made some paragraphs here that were about the theme uh in a meta way of what we're talking about, but I hope we can see that's just like it's actually communicating more in the same paragraph, but it's so much easier to follow. Because why is it easier? You've got a very clear topic sentence. This is the whole point of the paragraph. Like this is hey, reader, this is what I'm gonna give you in this paragraph. Here's my evidence straight from peer. Here's my explanation right here, what this suggests that reviewers are making judgments about, blah, blah. And then here's my linking sentence where or that repeating that R, that that lower bun of where that's gonna create a flow about improving uh publication right here. And that's gonna create a flow and momentum into the next next paragraph. Um, in this this kind of formula is very, very common across fields in academic writing. And like I said, we'll go through some examples uh in a second. Um now, what am I saying here? I I don't think that this is a writing problem. I I think the person who wrote this um would be able to write this. This is a thinking problem. And often, if you have a clear outline, you'll have clear topic sentence because your outline will have okay, this paragraph is making this point. The next point my outline is this point, and that lines up to your paragraph's topic sentence and has evidence and examples to back it up. So this sits really nicely with the way you want to construct your paper anyway, which is by making outlines. And yes, you do need to make an outline at this level, you can't just wing it, maybe like you've done in grade school or for your other essays. These papers are just too complex for you to hold all this information and data in your head and to create the most linear, logically structured argument. You need an outline. So, guys, if you don't have an outline, uh, well, how are you gonna have clear thinking structure if if you haven't done it? Now, I cards on the table. I sometimes skip an outline because I have done this for so many years, I naturally think in outlines. I naturally am creating outlines as I go because I have through the force of habit in years and years of training, my mind just works that way. Peer automatically comes to me. But you guys might need to practice this. It's a bit like uh when I first started playing tennis, I didn't have any lessons and I played for a lot of time on the tennis court and I was terrible. I didn't get any better. I didn't have the right mechanics to even play properly. And if you don't even have those basics in place, you can't improve. And it's the same thing here. A lot of you have never been taught riding properly, you're just expected to figure it out. But without having an actual system or the mechanics to work from, like in tennis, if you don't know how to hit a forehand properly, it's not gonna get better. If you don't know what top spin is, how are you gonna be able to spin the ball and achieve the goal you want with your shot? Is the same thing here in riding. You need to understand a writing system. Um, and and this is whether you're a native or non-native English speaker, right? Because that's commonly when people are saying I've got riding problems. Uh, well, now you can get Grammarly and others to fix the non-native English speaker problem. What you you're strip all that away, and what you're left with is really the core of what it always was was this thinking structure problem. Uh okay, I'm gonna come back to the chat and uh we'll uh we'll go through uh some examples in the literature. Um so here we go. Minary. Hey, good to see you, binary point, evidence, explanation. Yeah, it's is peer, so is the R in the mnemonic, but exactly right. SNG Tensin asks, where am I located? Uh right now I am in Milan, but I split my time between uh Milan and the US. Um, and we're truly quite international here. Uh I bet if we do a roll call, we'll see people from all over the world. I can see Andrea's with us. Hey Andrea, hey Claudio. Um, so let me go through a couple example papers um so you can see what what's going on here. So let me open up a new tab. And let me pull up something. Let's go to Google Scholar. And all right, I've been looking at thinking about trade and health lately. So let's find something that looks good, could be interesting to look at. Let's look at we'll we'll go. I know this guy, uh Derek Yak was a former professor of mine. We'll go look at his. Let's go find anything else that looks good. This one could be interesting. Global trade, public health. Uh let's maybe take a look at this one. Uh yeah, this looks like it could be could be kind of interesting too. And uh let's see something else. That this one also looks pretty good. So there's quite a few good ones here. Anyway, we can go through multiple of these. Um, I I I like this literature personally, so I sometimes do come through this. Um, and one of the professors who works with us, um, Professor Courtney McNamara, um, this is this is her wheelhouse. This is totally her specialty. But let's take a look. Okay, so here we got uh this is reflection, could be anything though, and let's go grab some paragraphs. Okay, this is a nice example. Um, can you make sure you guys can see the screen? Wait, can you guys see the screen? No, I think I gotta zoom in a little bit more here. Okay, here's a nice one. Okay, so trade financial liberalization could offer benefits that improved health status. This paragraph, you read that and you already know what this paragraph is gonna give you. It's gonna say, Oh, it could offer this how, and uh, that's what it's gonna say. For example, here's an example of how it can do that. How trade or financial liberalization could offer uh could improve health. Here's another example, right? Improving standards, right? So pretty good example. Point um evidence, evidence, and uh down here is is giving uh uh some like again evidence stroke uh explanation. Here, on the other hand, it's now it's going in the outline saying what could be the negative effects, like a very uh simple thing here. Now going the opposite. Topic sentence saying now we're gonna go through the negative effects, and it goes through that here. And actually, this is a really nice okay. This is a nice example um overall in this paper. But it's just to show you that this is very clear writing that reduces that cognitive fatigue for your readers and will make it overall easier for them to accept your paper. It will also avoid those frustrating misunderstandings when you have something on your paper that they clearly missed. You'll know you're doing this right when you can follow our skip test, and that's basically you can skip. You just read the first sentence of each paragraph and you can bounce from one paragraph to the next. So here, trade liberalization could improve health. Status. On the other hand, there could be some negative health effects here, right? I can follow this outline pretty cleanly, balancing from one point, the main point of each paragraph, paragraph to paragraph, going down through the paper. I'm not gonna do this the whole way. We'll look at another example. I just want to bounce back to the chat for a second and see if this is all clear. We got a shout out from the LinkedIn user here from Germany. Hey, welcome. Good to have you with us. Uh I can see our uh friend of the community here, Jeff, is here. What do you think about the idea of using a gen AI tool to take your notes, highest level objectives to provide a first draft outline? Um, let me come back to that, Jeff. It's it's a good question. Um, and this is a good use case. It depends what you're doing. So I'll I'll come back. But Jeff makes a point neurodivergent students may find it somewhat challenging to think naturally in outlines. I don't think anybody naturally thinks in terms of outlines. It's something you train yourself into. I mean, we're not robots. Maybe AI thinks naturally in outlines. Uh, we don't. Um, so but that that is something you can train with very structured, structured thinking. Um, and it's also a very clean way. It might not be the most exciting way, uh, but can be the cleanest way to present information. And that's really really what your goal is. Oh, here we go. We got Earl Lewis from Namibia. So, yeah, folks from Germany here in the chat, Namibia, um, truly international community, guys. Love to see your hit like, that definitely helps the algorithm, as I've learned. And going from professor to doing stuff on YouTube, that does help us reach other people. Um, so uh from the first two examples, Fun Sho asked a question here. Is it because the first talked about rejection and the citation didn't mention rejection? Oh, okay. You're you're talking about the examples on the whiteboard. Let me pull that up. I'm really glad you asked that. Um, so right. So this one here, no, because um, right, so here it's saying academic writing. Imagine this first paragraph here. Academic writing is a complex skill that many researchers struggle with. So your evidence and examples don't really follow that here, right? So it's not that this topic sentence is wrong. It's just that what then follows as your evidence and explanation doesn't follow it. So if I would say academic writing is a complex skill that many researchers struggle with, imagine if I doctored this a bit and said, instead, imagine I said, instead, uh, you know, seven out of ten researchers report they have never had any actual writing training uh and were expected to just figure it out. Um, another study found that when uh early stage researchers started using the peer system, um uh they are their writing competence improved from, I don't know, self-reported one, two, three. I don't know, something like that. But you need some evidence or examples that's actually gonna back up your topic sentence. Instead, what we had here was just like a hamburger smushing too much stuff together. So in isolation, this is a good piece of evidence. This is actually a good piece of evidence, but you know what? This could be its own topic sentence for its own paragraph. So I I might unpack this and say there are various reasons why papers get rejected, including this. The top two reasons are you know, a survey, a survey of editors found that the main uh reason in natural science was, I don't know, XYZ. Another in blah blah blah. You see that this would be another topic sentence that would then go here. And this is actually very common that you would you would see people smushing together what should be have room to breathe in two or three paragraphs. Um, so uh uh funcho does uh does that help uh make sense? This is a whole lot cleaner because the topic sentence is aligned with the evidence and the explanation that comes later. Side note, this R, it's it's not strictly necessary. It it can be helpful, but it's not always necessary. You could actually end this this paragraph right here, and this this unit would be intact. Um, so this this this lower button is optional. It's just like uh, you know, you could eat an open-faced sandwich. You don't need both buttons on the burger uh if you're trying to save some calories, or in this case, if you're trying to be a little bit leaner with your word count. Um uh, but thanks for asking that. That's a really good question. I can go through, guys. We can go through some more example. I pulled up a few papers, we can go through some more example papers. I just want to make sure you guys have the concept. And what I want you to do is take a look at your own writing and see now. Well, are my paragraphs following the one paragraph rule? So read the first sentence of your paragraphs. Is your one main point clear? Is your evidence specific and directly linked to that point? Have you explained what the evidence mean, or did you just drop it there and have the reviewers figure it out? And optionally, do you have some kind of bridge at the end of your paragraph that helps you get to your next paragraph? And so you might find that some of your paragraphs are doing multiple jobs, it might bury the point, it might present evidence without explaining it. If you can fix those first, those are your quick clarity wins for today. And just do this with any section of your paper. You could do it. The results, the discussion, the intro, the lit review, whatever you think feels the weakest and maybe is the uh the least clear. Um we got another hi from Jamaica. Oh, this might, I think this is Susan. Hey Susan, just judging your 070707 sam. Um uh where you guys get these names from. Um Ed is saying this is called coherence. So, yeah, you definitely need this coherence. So, coherence isn't a great way to think about it, uh, I'd say as well. Uh uh, I just says uh I peer review articles while drinking wine. It is definitely one way to maintain uh work health balance. I'm not an advocate hugely of um uh drinking excessively, although I do have a uh I mean I don't practice what I preach in public health. There's a lot of hypocrisy out there in public health. I do like a glass of wine, and I've trained as a similar, so that's uh another side note, but uh that's for another conversation. Um, and it is saying every paragraph, one main statement, more statements to support the topic sentence. Exactly, exactly. Think of this again. We're not doing colorful creative writing, we just want to communicate the ideas as simply, linearly, and clearly as possible. That's why each paragraph has that one point, and the things that go into that paragraph are gonna back it up. And this kind of first paragraph that you see here is a type of thing I see in writers a lot, and that is not a non-English speaker problem. That is a thinking problem, and it's not even a writing problem. You think it's a writing problem, but is a thinking structure problem. Um, cool. Funcho, I'm glad. See, and guys, I love when you ask these kinds of questions uh because that makes it so much clearer for other people who who are watching here who might been have been scratching their head and wondering uh the same thing. So really glad you asked that. Um, okay. So I'll leave it up to you guys if you want me to run through more examples in literature, though. I think you're starting to get the idea. I can see Ghazala is joining us from uh India, Bangalore. Uh, welcome. Um, yeah, just a real pleasure to have all of you here. And Ed is saying, hey, uh fan from Taiwan, studying management, all your steps. Uh you look uh muscles. Uh interesting. How do you take a balance between work and health? Well, that's not the wine, but um, you know, research is a hard grind. And there is a parallel here. Uh, I do recommend, I have recommended before grad students go to the gym because if you can mentally gain control and and kind of compel your body to do the hard yards and push yourself to the limits and recover well, well, not only are you getting great endorphin highs, and we know a lot of good ideas uh can come in these these spaces where maybe you're taking a walk or in the shower or even training or doing sports, giving your subconscious room to breathe. But um, it's it's that that discipline that you develop uh in in the gym to push things when you're at your limits, you think you're hard, you can't anymore, and you push a little bit more, you get comfortable in that uncomfortable space where you're pushing yourself and stretching yourself a bit. Um, you you train that in the gym. And in some ways, as an academic, you're a mental athlete. I mean, you are are you're intellectually producing knowledge, and you will feel stretched, very much like you feel stretched in the gym. And you've got to get comfortable being uncomfortable in that space. You're you're leaning into something that is incredibly difficult to do research. I mean, doing the PhD, I've just released some videos on my channel about this, it's not like any other degree. In the other degree, it's kind of a conveyor belt, cookie cut, step one, step two. You know, you do this, you read this book, you learn the material, you'reg regurgitating an exam, you're gonna get a good grade. But suddenly PhD is like, well, welcome to the big world of you got to produce research at the highest level. Well, there's no roadmap or manual to doing that. Well, I say that I think inside our membership communities, we've come as close as possible as you can to taking that whole process and making the implicit logic that isn't always spelled out clear, kind of like you see with our peer writing system. Um, and then once you see it, you can't unsee it. But uh, yeah, and I'm glad you glad you asked that. I definitely think that uh some kind of activity could be could be yoga, could just be walking. Um I I personally as a man find uh going to the gym uh lifting weights or training to be particularly helpful. And I I don't think uh I don't think there's a disconnect at all between that and functioning physically, if you're functioning optimally, it's gonna spill over and help you function mentally more optimally. Last thing I'm gonna say on that, if somebody offered you a pill that would instantly make you sleep better, smarter, improve your memory, make you look better, uh, make you more confident, and they'd offer you this pill and say you could have it for free. Um, would you take it? And I don't know, and no side effects. Uh, you probably would. And that bill is exercise. Um, so okay, I digress. Um, cool. Cooking, cooking. I I love this one. Cooking is a nice one too, my area. I do uh I have had a lot of Italian grandmothers teach me some some really good stuff, and that that's been a great joy being in Italy. And uh, you know, given how international we are, maybe inside our FTG communities, we gotta ask people to trace some recipes with each other. Um, and uh Gazella says, Love you, FTG. That's cool, that's awesome. Uh yeah, well, let me know what you like about it. I always like that that feedback because some people say they love the courses, some people say they love the workshops, uh, different things. Um, so thanks. And then Ed says, Yeah, I feel like academic papers like self-training, writing competition. Exactly. You have this is the hard thing, right? Nobody, you know, I think one of the things that you're kind of like an entrepreneur in a way is an academic. You're trying to become a leader in your field, and you're gonna eventually push the forefront of that field. And at some point, nobody's showing you how anymore. You are the leader, and you are leading the other people in the field at some stage because you're gonna know more about your topic than anybody else in the world. You will get to that point. You you won't be at the beginning, obviously. But that takes self-training, self-discipline, self-motivation. And if you can achieve that in another domain, like the gym, it transfers. I find it transfers. Um, so uh self-trained academic favors like self-training writing competition. I I like that though. There's definitely something to be be, you're definitely on to something really, uh, really quite right there, Ed. Um and G Heep Kim asks, how could I hone my skills in academic writing for the coherent logics and arguments? So, you know, and I think sometimes, as they say, is the writing. Well, this is actually the thinking. So uh I remember when I got to grad school at Yale, and there was a professor, uh Professor Schlesinger, health policy guy, super smart. I just remember hearing him talk and the way he could think and deconstruct a policy issue. I just remember thinking, man, I want to be able to think like that guy. It's so clear how he can dismantle a problem into his component parts, then reassemble it, but with greater clarity. Uh almost, I imagine, like a car mechanic could take an engine and pull it apart, put it back together, but diagnose exactly what the issue was, and he could do this intellectually, mentally. And I I just I kind of dream, like I want to have that kind of clarity and precision in my own thinking. And um so so Gee, I I don't think you'll necessarily solve this with writing. I think um you you I think the way to think about the writing is the writing should come after you have done the heavy analysis and you've got your logic and argument lined up. Like the writing, often I would think about is the last 10%. And so some people say on my channel, how on earth can you write a paper in a day? Well, uh, I actually did that. I don't know if people didn't believe me, but I've definitely done this multiple times. Um, it's because the writing's last 10%. And so if you have everything assembled, you already know what you need to say, you have the data and evidence, it it just all can all flow. But if you're still trying to figure it out as you're writing, then you you're already setting yourself up for a torturous journey and going in circles. Ed recommends style the basics of clarity and grace. Okay, that's a cool one. I am a big fan of uh, I mean, there's multiple ones out there. Um I I don't find they're necessarily adapted that well to academic writing. There probably is a good book. I mean, we've tweaked our own just drawing on different inspirational sources um that creates a common language for us to use around writing, but different principles that are out there. Um, you gotta think in terms of both the sentence level. So at the sentence level, you might think about getting rid of unnecessary words, you might want to think about writing an active rather than passive voice. And I can explain this in another day and in another breath, uh, if you guys want me to. At the paragraph level, that's more where our peer system comes in. And then at the next level, zooming out, um, then you've got the the outline and the structure. And and those three ingredients, what you do at the sentence level, what you do at the paragraph level, and how you get that structure right, it is really the kind of the core of our fast track writing system. But yeah, definitely some great books out there, and um, I'll check that one out too because I always like to see if there are things we can lift that will help uh help you guys. Um, okay, so I'm not seeing any uh recommendations that you guys want to go through more academic articles. That's good. Let me go through uh the submission we had this week. Um, so let me pull this up, and this was a long one. So I'm just gonna paste the whole question onto the whiteboard and let's take a look together. Uh this was quite long, and I've just messed up the formatting. Uh okay. I'll let's see, this is quite long. Let's let's break this into parts. So my question is, okay, I'll read this out, guys, because I know some of you guys are maybe even in a car somewhere listening to us, so I will read this so everybody can follow along. Um, all right. My manuscript is ready according to my knowledge, and I've submitted to my two supervisors. None of them has ever reviewed it, and for now, both of them are busy reviewing thesis and dissertations for students who are expected to graduate this summer or semester. However, I checked three journals and I prepared one manuscript according to the format of the journal and communicated to the editor was okay to receive my work, but I could not send it because I'm waiting for the permission for my supervisors, at least for them to review it and provide technical insight about it before submission. The other journals require me to submit attachments and names of authors and addresses with condition that every author should be aware of the submission, so I could not submit to both of them. All right. Um, first thing 100%, this is an ethical issue. You need to make sure all your authors do agree for you to submit the article. If they're not an author in your paper, then it's more of a courtesy and may not even be necessary. But if they are an author, this is 100% right. Every author, like you said yourself, every author should be aware of the submission and agree to it. You can get yourself in hot water if you don't do that. So that's a big no-no, don't do that. Um, second, now, why I mean, I I can't go inside their heads and say why are they not paying attention to you? Uh, there can be multiple things going on. One is it can be simply they aren't expecting you to publish papers. Maybe for them, paper publishing isn't even a priority in their own career right now, or a less favorable charitable interpretation is maybe they don't think what you're going to produce is very good, and they think it's gonna be a whole lot of meaningless work that they don't see any reward to themselves out of. So it ends up low in their priority list. Could be multiple things going on, uh, from that benign kind of neglect, just that they're busy, to it's just you're in their too difficult pile and you're not the easy person in their inbox. I can't decipher that for you. Um, but it, you know, if they are co-authors, you gotta wait for them. Um, and you should not be submitting the same paper to uh the multiple journals at the same time. Uh so I do worry about that. So is this delay likely to have any repercussion in relation to publication, you ask? Um, just depends. Just depends on the topic. There's some topics that you'll get scooped in a month or two months if there's a lot of research competition in the area. Uh, so I don't know. I wouldn't know without looking at it. Uh, if you would have if you would upload your paper uh to the workshop, we can take a look and you can get my personal feedback. That's what the session's for. Uh, how long should you continue waiting? Well, given that's your first manuscript, not to be mean, but um, I have almost never seen someone never write a manuscript before, write their first manuscript, and that was good to go out the door. Like it would need tweaking on the writing, maybe presenting the results and figures. So my guess, I could be wrong, is that you're a lot further away from being publication ready than you think. That would be my guess. I could be wrong, and I'm not trying to be mean. I'm just that is a broad stereotype based on what I've seen of people who are submitting for the first time, they haven't had any feedback, and they come to me with their manuscript. Um, so one thing you can do, and I recommend more and more, is an AI peer review. And you can find that on some of our AI on my channel. I've actually got a cheat sheet that shows you the direct prompt that I recommend. We intentionally use Chat GPT for that because that's the most commonly used one. But the idea is to uh reverse engineer what um we we know of over half papers are using AI in their peer reviews now because it's unpaid work. And what would you expect the reviewers to do if they're gonna be a bit lazy and maybe having a glass of wine on the plane? I'm actually not using AI uh for peer review. I found AI use cases for a lot of things for me actually takes me longer than not using AI. Uh but um you need to be prepared. So that would be something you can do in the absence of feedback. Um, hope that hope that helps. And then this also worries me because you said you start working on your research proposal. Uh so typically you'll have your research proposal typically um coming after. Uh sorry, before uh and your manuscript comes after that. Um, so I'm glad you watched the peer style and the did and found style and the let review chapter. That's all very good. Uh that's very good. Did plus found style is kind of you want to take in your literature review or did plus found style, you want to take reviewers to the edge of evidence, the edge of the knowledge base. And to do that, you have to get into the weeds of what did these papers do and what did they find. You have to get into their methods, you have to get into their findings and be specific and definite about them. And so that that that's what that formula is. Uh how long should the paragraph be to skip? We talked a little bit about the skip test. That's just the topic sentence. And yeah, we talked about today that the linking sentence that that repeating that that other bun of peer is not necessarily is not strictly. Required. And you need some technical support from someone who's in environmental engineering geography. So this makes me worry as well that you're gonna have a manuscript that's ready to submit, and you're telling me you're like a neophyte in the field. Um, I mean, I think you need to get yourself. I mean, look, I'm biased of course. Um, we have some fantastic research groups. You could join a truly global community with over 200 members from around the world. It's awesome. It's just a it's a lot more fun to go through the journey together with a supportive community. And we have awesome workshops and some really if if you liked our content and our courses, you'd love it. Could be us. I know there are others out there that do it too. So go find whose approach resonates with you. Um, but yeah, I mean, I mean, this to me tells me you're looking for some kind of support out there. Um, so also I'd encourage you, if you're not getting feedback from your faculty, you can also reach out to others. You can reach out to others, you don't have to stay inside your university um to find co-authors, colleagues, and mentors. Um, so don't sit there passively and hope good things will come to you. Uh, now's the time to be proactive. Um, so thanks for sharing that with us. Um uh I hope that's helpful to you. Really good questions. All right, guys. I'm gonna come back, take some final questions, and we will call it a day and uh send you guys off to have a great weekend. So uh we've got Bungie001 says, Hey prof, it's Bungie. Um, I want to publish a conference paper, very niche conference. Max length is five papers. I'm guessing this is maybe a computer science or AI conference paper because there are publishing conferences is more important. Um what else should what should I do or do differently? Five pages is so little. Uh this always reminds me of how Hemingway said, uh sorry to a friend. Uh sorry, I wrote you a long letter. I didn't have time to write a short one. Uh yeah. Um it's a great challenge to be pithy and concise with your evidence and to explain a lot with just a little. So obviously, you're gonna have to be ruthless on your word count. So that means really looking hard and cutting unnecessary words, cutting any fluff, uh, having a lean outline uh that makes your points, being lean with your tables and figures. Probably can't have a ton of tables and figures uh in there. And often you'll you'll see this. Some papers like Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, they'll put all the methods in an appendix, um, some nature journals as well, be very short and compact, and a lot of the details go elsewhere. So I would model yours off. So there's something we always do uh in ours, our field, whatever field you're in, with our researchers, is we go find what we call the nearest neighbor paper conceptually to yours. So go find the paper, conference paper out there, maybe that's been published that's closest to yours. Um, you're probably gonna want to cite that anyway in your introduction to establish how you added value and you went beyond that paper. Um so, but that will doubly then serve as a model for how they approached it. So having that model in front of you can really help you write up your paper, um, especially as you're carving it up. And of course, the journal or conference itself will have their own guidelines on what they want to see. Sometimes in a granular way, they'll say what subsections they want, what even what subtitles they want, what length they want for the various sections. Uh, so definitely consult that that guide. Um, but yeah, my guess is you're in some kind of computer science or AI or or other field that places a premium on conference papers. And if that's the case, um, you know, a short manuscript is fine. I mean, even in medical journals, often you'll see manuscripts that are 3,000 words in length, which is not very long. It's the same sort of deal. So uh um yeah, I pre I prefer shorter manuscripts overall. Uh okay, uh Jeff says, uh, oh yeah, Jeff, thanks for reminding me. Gen AI question. Yeah, so definitely you can dump in your notes and have Gen AI come up with an outline. Uh, I would prefer you to have a first pass at thinking through an outline from your notes. But if you've just taken over time a lot of different messy notes and you want to make sure you don't miss anything, um you you could do it that way. You could say, hey, can you can you make an outline? But you gotta be really clear when you make an outline, an outline for what? Uh out of your notes, you could probably spit a bunch of different outlines. So you don't want Gen A AI to do the thinking for you. But if you say you know, you have this argument you want to make, help me synthesize this into the most linear outline, that's a good way to go. Um alternatively, I like you having an outline, right? You want to know that in your paper, you want to know the direction, you want to know where you want to finish. Like before, you know, when you get in a car, unless you have a lot of time to kill, you usually know where you're going. And you're not just taking the car for a spin. So uh find this will get messed up if you don't kind of know where you want to finish. Um, so I think you'll get better success out of using Jet AI if you already know where you want to end up and you already have maybe your own broad spine, and you say, here's all my notes. Have I missed anything? Is this the most linear way to do this? Could I make this clearer? Uh, can you help me refine my outline? That could be quite useful. And and I think AI can be really great if you have a whole bunch of notes and you don't want to sift back through all those to ask if you've missed anything. So I've been doing this lately too. I might have huge data, and this takes advantage of what machines can do better. Go through everything. Have I missed anything? What could be a useful quote here or useful site out of these articles? I like using notebook LM for that because I can dump in a whole bunch of articles, and it is much better at not hallucinating, just sticking to the article set that I have uploaded there. Uh so that really helps me in constructing right the introduction to a paper, which is gonna be a strategic argument for why my paper needs to exist. If I have all my lit review papers and PDFs in that notebook, uh in Notebook LM, which is 100% free, um, that can really help me say, have I missed a quote or anything that could help reinforce the gap here, or um kind of a good factor figure about why this conversation is so important right now. Um, and Jeff, I know you've got access to some of our introduction templates, so you can actually use AI to engage quite nicely with the templates in that way. I hope that helps, Jeff, and that that's answered your question. In short, I wouldn't blindly to get the best result, I wouldn't blindly rely on AI to generate your outline. Um, you need to give it a little bit more about what what purpose, what you're trying to achieve, what the paper's for to get the best result. Um, so there we go. Okay, my Neri says uh I'm an early researcher. What's the best advice uh when you want to argue previous study methods? Not sure I fully understand your question, but let me take a crack at this. So maybe you you're saying you want to argue previous studies or methods are missing something or weak. I'm guessing. So you have to do this in a delicate way because in your introduction, you might have that conceptual nearest neighbor I might mention a moment ago, and you don't want to totally trash that paper because that person is likely to be your reviewer. So you have to say that frame it in a nice way that you know they they did this important contribution that got us to here, but have yet to, or in their but they suggested future research would be needed to do the following. So, even better if you can say that they said they need what your paper is gonna then go on to do. So you want to kind of frame the past papers all as pointing to the need for your paper that's coming up and do it in a diplomatic way to where you haven't completely upset these researchers who will then want to kill your paper. I hope that hope that was. I'm not 100% sure. I was trying to decipher your question. Um hope that makes sense. And Bungie says, yeah, battery energy storage systems, yeah, exactly. So, Bungie, you're probably just gonna have um mainly some figures showing your system and articulating your results, like what you did, what you found, um, quite clearly. Uh, five pages is tight. You're not gonna have extensive lit review at all. Um, you'll probably have an introduction that's just three paragraphs. Uh spend a little more heavy-duty time in your methods and results, and a short conclusion. Um, but um, yeah, happy to take a look if you share that future sessions. Gazala asks steps for a new researcher in a new area of research for a master's thesis. How do I get a handle on the subject and complete the literature review before we start writing or start writing simultaneously? Um so again, I don't know what the method you're using is for your thesis or what the research question is, or if you even have a topic yet. I think the first thing you got to do is maybe figure out what your topic is. Uh, I'd watch dissertation planning 101. It was last week's live that will help you in this planning. And of course, Gazala, if you have access, go through a dissertation blueprint course. It's gonna make sure you follow all the right steps and get that planning in place. Um, so right, just recalling. Some of you saw this last week. Supervisor alignment test, um, scope existing dissertations, past dissertations, and calibrate yours to theirs. Um, get in your topic neighborhood with our convergence method. Um, make sure that uh you want to publish, or if not, you know what your end goal is. If you just want to tick the box and get it done, that's gonna change things. If you do want to publish, then you need to take the step to find a publishable gap, right? Notice you haven't you haven't been writing anything yet in all this. This is dissertation planning, this is thesis planning. So um um I I won't go through the rest of that gazelle, but those are already plenty of steps. And my guess is because you're saying you're a new researcher in a new area and you're already thinking about writing, that you might have like the 90% of researchers I know out there go lost past some of those fundamental dissertation planning steps. Um, so uh Luca, shout out from Nigeria. Cool guys, this is a lot of fun. I gotta ask you this kind of roll call. Where are where is everyone internationally? It's such a blessing for me uh to be able to uh connect with you from all over the world. It's really a joy. Thanks for joining us, guys. If you are on team replay here, I go through and comment and reply to every single comment that comes through here, uh, even afterwards. So let me know. Hit like helps the algorithm reach other people who could be like you. The algorithm sees you like it, somehow find somebody else who's like you based on their searches, what they've been looking for, and gets this in front of them. And you don't know who you're helping by hitting the like button. So thanks for that. Um, my narrative, glad that helps. And Gazala saying you got a topic and you like to publish. Um, that's awesome. Yeah, Gizala, I encourage you to submit to the workshop, maybe more specific, so we can get into it and uh help convert uh what what you you're looking at specifically and kind of help you flesh out that roadmap plan that will get you from where you are to publishing and finishing the thesis fast. So you could either submit that to uh the next workshop here on Friday. Happy to take a look, or uh in our private workshops, that we've got five of them a week. Um, it's also a great place to do that. So uh I always love it when you guys are happy to share for the whole world because it's for the public good and everybody can benefit from this thinking. When I went back and talked about that guy, Professor Schlesinger, who I learned a lot from, and I wanted to learn how he thought, I just wanted to put myself in a research environment around him and see so importantly, how live he would tackle a research question and just dismantle it and think about it. And it was almost the that those implicit parts of well, how did you think about this? What steps did you take to approach this complex problem and break it down uh and address it? That's what I wanted, what I try to do here live with you guys is is uh think aloud so you can get a window into my own thought process, and hopefully you'll benefit in uh some small way from that too. Guys, we are right at time. I hope you have a fabulous weekend. I am going to go enjoy a sunny rest of the afternoon in Milan. Hope you do something nice, it could be training, like we were talking about with uh Eddie before, or a glass of wine on a plane, some of you, or uh or a nice stroll in in the park. But yeah, have a great weekend and I will look forward to seeing you same place, same time.