Prática de Shadowing: Science Writing: Practice Makes It (Almost) Perfect - Aprenda a falar inglês com vídeo

Thanks for coming today.

When I first started as a scientist, I started as a scientist because I loved science.

I took a genetics course when I was an undergraduate.

It was really interesting.

I started working in a lab, and I decided that I wanted to go to graduate school, earn my PhD, and then run my own lab.

And what I didn't know when I made that career choice is

that what I would ultimately spend probably 70

or maybe a higher percentage of my time doing was writing

and I might well have been dissuaded if I had known

that I wouldn't have this wonderful just sitting in my lab thinking of new experiments

and executing those experiments but it turns out

that once you get to the stage in the career

that I'm at now a lot of times

that gets left to other people in the lab and

so I spend a lot of my time writing now

and reading and that's okay I enjoy both of those things

but I didn't really understand

when I started in science how important writing was going to be

and so the first thing that I have is just some examples of things

that one might do on a regular basis is either an academic scientist

or a government or industry scientist and so one of the most important things is giving presentations.

So I write a lot of lectures.

Those include presentations that I give either to classes that I teach

or I go out and give seminars and tell people about my work and that of course requires writing.

I give poster presentations at meetings.

My students do this as well.

I spend a lot of my time writing grant proposals or writing scholarly articles.

Those of course could be review articles or research articles.

Another thing that I spend a lot of my time doing is peer review

and so I read proposals that other people have submitted to funding agencies I read papers

that people have submitted for publication

and then some other kinds of things I don't write books

but my some of my colleagues do I write a lot

of recommendation letters I write a lot of research summaries

and abstracts in my own department we have you know a progress report due every year

if you have a grant from one of the major your funding agencies, you'll have to tell them each year, the work that you've done and the progress that you've made in that work.

But there are just a lot of kinds of things

that you have to do as a science that are related to the science, but maybe not the things that you expected to do when you first realized you had this drive and love for science.

So it turns out that all of these examples that I've given to you, in my opinion, have really one thing in common.

And what that commonality is, is that they require that the writer or the lecturer

or whatever really put forth some sort of argument and then back that argument up, okay?

When you write a grant proposal or you write a research paper in particular, that is the most important thing that you're going to do.

You're going to make an argument to your reviewers and then support that argument with facts, basically, okay?

So it really doesn't make you seem all that smart

if you're always making lots of typos if you don't use proper sentences and structure in your writings, particularly when you need to provide an explanation about something really complicated like science is complicated.

And of course that's supposed to make you laugh, but the reality is when you send your proposals and your papers off or when you give a lecture or something,

you really want to be clear, you want to have no grammar errors if possible, you don't want to have spelling errors all over the place,

you really need to think about your writing and make sure that it's clear and error -free, okay?

And so why is good writing important?

Well, because you're communicating your ideas in your research findings as a scientist, right?

And so you need those ideas to be clear, and that helps you limit the misunderstandings that people might have about what you're trying to say.

And so what you, for instance, in a grant proposal, sometimes you'll get these reviews back from people that look at those proposals,

and what you don't want to have happen is somebody go well they didn't discuss such

and such in the proposal and then you say

but yes I did it's on page 15 because what

that indicates is that

while you may have discussed it you may not have discussed

it clearly enough for your reviewer to understand the point sometimes it's a bad reviewer

but a lot of times it's

because you're not being clear in describing what you are trying to describe it is also really important particularly for grant proposals,

that you be very concise in your wording.

Grant proposals almost always have a page limit or a word limit

and so you have to think carefully about how can I describe my idea succinctly, okay?

And then of course you want to make sure that the information you're providing is accurate.

Okay?

And I'm going to posit that somebody who writes well,

that helps them think clearly about whatever they're talking about or whatever they're writing about, okay?

So it helps inform you and make you think more clearly about what you're doing.

When I was a graduate student, there were two really painful things that they made us do in my department.

One of them is that we had to give seminars basically every year on our research.

And for those of us who took

that very seriously it made us better speakers at the end of the day

because a lot of times what you're going to do

when you get into academic science is you're going to give talks just like the one I'm giving today.

The other thing

that they did to us is they made us write up a research report every year in our department

and our department was actually fairly unusual in doing that

but what it made you do is it made you think very deeply about your research aims

and goals and the progress that you were making and And

so writing helps bring sort of these things to a head even

and helps you think more clearly about what you're doing

and then hopefully you can help that inform your next draft of whatever you're writing.

Okay, so a few thoughts that I have on writing is that it really doesn't matter what career path you take.

It is important to be a good communicator.

It is important to be a good writer.

If you are an academic scientist, an industrial scientist, if you become a physician, if you become a school teacher.

I think it's really important to be a good writer

because who is going to take you seriously and believe in your credentials

and your ability to do something if you can't communicate, okay?

I also am going to say that organization, content, spelling,

and grammar are always important and I highlighted spelling

because that's one of the things

that people often will let get through a grant proposal

that they've edited lots of times and maybe they're using spell check and it's not catching some of the vocabulary

or maybe they edited for other things

and they just really didn't pay attention to the spelling

and i even had a colleague recently who got grant proposals review back from a grant

that was not funded and someone even commented on the number of spelling errors

that were in the proposal this kind of thing irritates reviewers

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i'm busy you're busy you don't want to read a proposal that's full of errors

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and spelling errors are some of the easiest ones for people to identify.

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Sometimes I'm sure that I have errors of some sort of grammatical error in every proposal

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that I send but I really try hard to minimize those

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and people may be a little bit less able to distinguish some of those

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but they're going to catch the spelling and they're going to notice that.

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I also believe very strongly that writing is improved by revision and continual practice.

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Another thing that I suggest

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that you want to do is you want to read examples of writing in whatever your field is.

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And it's actually very instructive to identify examples of good writing as well as bad writing

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because that will help you as you read more papers and you begin to see, well, which one was more clear and which one wasn't.

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That will help you learn to become a better writer.

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and so you should practice some more.

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When you write things you need to spend a lot of time editing.

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Every time I'm working on a proposal

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and I start writing on it again a second day I actually saved my proposal every single day

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and I keep this huge running list of each day

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that I've worked on the proposal

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because some days I make some really major changes to proposals

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and maybe I go oh no I didn't actually want to do

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that and so if I've saved it every day I can go back the day before

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and you know change things and mix them back in

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but you constantly are going to need to be rereading

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and thinking and editing papers and proposals as you're writing them

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and then you want to practice some more

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and you want to practice some more

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that will help you become a better writer okay a few other simple writing tips

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that I have for you is that you want to keep it simple

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when you're writing we are not here to write poetry We are not here to write pretty flashy sentences.

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Most scientists really want to get to the meat of the problem and get the information.

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And so you want to write concise, clear sentences where you limit the flowery language, you limit the jargon as much as you can.

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We each have particular words and jargon that we will use for our fields, but you want to limit that to some extent.

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And you want to not use so many abbreviations that makes it impossible for somebody to read whatever you've written, unless they're right there in your field, okay?

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Because that also is frustrating, particularly as a reviewer or if you're trying to read a paper

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that you think might be interesting and inform your work

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and you can't get through it because they've got so many abbreviations in there that you can't read it, okay?

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You, of course, want to write in complete sentences, and that often is going to mean subject, verb, object.

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I would also suggest, particularly for a grant proposal or something, that you want to have discrete paragraphs for each major idea and transition.

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Don't use contractions or exclamation points in the formal writing that you might do.

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And grant proposals are going to have word limits.

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And so what you really want to do is make everything

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that you say essential and important to whatever point you're trying to make in your paper or your grant proposal.

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You also should not generally make unsupported statements of fact or opinion.

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You want to have, if you say something, you want to have an example that backs that up.

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If I write something and I'm not sure did I use the right word, did I need a comma there, did I need a semicolon,

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I go to my grammar book and and I admit that to even my undergraduates that I teach.

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I don't know everything, no one does, and so keep a good grammar book beside you.

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The other thing that you need to be very careful about doing, of course, is proofreading your work.

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It is always useful to ask colleagues to read things that you've written.

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You may think sometimes, oh, well, they don't know enough about my experiments or, you know, something like that,

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but they can always help identify errors in grammar and spelling and other kinds of issues of organization and stuff.

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And so even somebody who is not closely related to your research interest can be very helpful as you're writing, because they can help you proof your work.

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And then, of course, you want to revise, revise, revise.

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And so I was just looking.

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I had an eight -page proposal.

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I gave you guys a little piece of that proposal that was due recently, and I must have had 15 iterations of that chopped down from a 15 -page proposal.

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And so you're just constantly going back to that and revising

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and putting it down and thinking about it for a couple of days

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and coming back to it and revising it some more for clarity.

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So, ah, here's the book that we were talking about.

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It's called A Short Guide to Writing About Biology, and the edition that we're using right now in my course is the sixth edition from 2007,

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and so I wholeheartedly believe in the statement put forth by the author, I don't know how to say her last name, that all writing benefits from revision.

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So what are the components of successful proposals and manuscripts?

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Well the most important one is good ideas, and I don't want you to leave here today thinking that

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if I'm just a great writer that that's good enough because it's not.

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You have to start with a really great idea, okay?

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You also need strong preliminary data for a grant proposal or a strong completed data set for a paper, okay?

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And then you need to support either your preliminary data

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or your completed results and your good idea with an argument about why they're interesting and important, and where you might go from there with this, okay?

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So your job, and you'll notice I'm mostly focusing on the thing that I think most of us will spend most of our time doing, which is writing proposals and writing papers.

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And so your job is to convince reviewers.

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You want to convince them that the work that you're doing is important and interesting.

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That's tough to do sometimes.

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But sometimes it's hard to figure out what is the argument that I want to make, and how do I want to frame this, okay?

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And so it's going to depend, for instance, on a grant proposal on what funding agency are you targeting.

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So if you're going to send a proposal to the National Science Foundation, for instance, you don't want to talk about how you're going to cure cancer because they don't care about that.

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But if you are writing a proposal for the National Institutes of Health, they care about curing cancer.

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And so that might be part of your argument for why the research is interesting whereas

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if you sent maybe a similar set of experiments to the

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NSF you'd figure out a different way to frame your argument and why your research is interesting.

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The other things that you're trying to convince your reviewers of is

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that you have both the expertise to perform the experiments and the expertise to interpret those experiments.

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And then as I've already mentioned you want to make sure

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that this work is appropriate and the argument

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that you're framing is appropriate to the funding agency or even the journal that you're targeting.

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So when you're writing a proposal, for example, you need to think of an interesting question or set of experiments.

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You need to obtain your supporting results and data.

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And that lends itself to determining is this proposal that you have, is the research feasible?

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Because the Funding agencies really want to know, can this work be done?

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Can this person execute the set of experiments that they're describing?

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You want to create an outline when you're writing a proposal of what you're going to discuss.

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I always start with an outline and think about the things that I'm going to write about.

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and write a draft and sometimes that is the most painful part of the process

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and so what I would say to you is as you are starting to write a paper

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or a grant proposal just get something on paper, get some ideas down and just get something there

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that you can work with and go back and edit and keep working on and keep thinking about and keep revising.

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I also suggest that you get peer feedback, and I've mentioned this before.

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You might want to get peer feedback at this juncture, whatever you're doing, particularly for a proposal,

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but you certainly would like to get peer feedback once you've got something pretty good on paper

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that you can give to a colleague who's willing to take their time

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and to read it and help you figure out the places

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that you've either done a good job making your argument

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or a poor job or they might be able to help you

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and say you know I really don't think that's the experiment

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you want to do did you think about this experiment instead

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and those things are very valuable as you're getting ready

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and this is true for papers as well as for grant

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proposals okay different people are going to have different experiences

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and training and background and somebody might think of something

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that you haven't thought about

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that might be interpreted to be a fatal flaw in whatever you're doing

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and so it's very important to get feedback from somebody

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and then of course you want to get this feedback

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and revise your draft to keep going and revising over and over until the deadline comes basically.

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So as I already mentioned a lot of times particularly for grant proposals there's going to be a page limit

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or a word limit and boy that is sometimes the tough part right

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so you think oh if I had 50 pages I can really describe this and get all this information there, but you're not going to have 50 pages.

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For NSF, you have 15.

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For NIH, you have about 25.

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For some of the other funding agencies that kind of varies in between that or in some cases even shorter, I've written some two -page grant proposals.

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Boy, those are the hardest ones to write, right?

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Because you've got to persuade somebody in two pages, you've got an interesting idea, you've got a great set of experiments to execute and how you're going to interpret all of the experiments and results.

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That's very tough.

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So what you need to do is you've got to strive for clarity as you're writing.

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You have to identify the most important points.

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You want to make sure that you state an idea once.

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I notice in my own writing as I write proposals, I might have the same idea, you know, three different places in my proposal.

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And you've got to figure out, do I really need that in those three different places for clarity, or is that just extra stuff that's thrown in there?

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Maybe I can write that at the beginning and then when I'm introducing the section, but I don't need it the third time that I've got it, okay?

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Deadwood phrases are phrases that use more words than necessary to convey a point.

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And I underlined a few that I know that I use sometimes, that I know that I come across pretty frequently in writing for my class.

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And so a majority of X.

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Well, why say a majority of?

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Just say most, okay?

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How about we come to a conclusion?

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we came to the conclusion that X.

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Why don't you just say we concluded X, okay?

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Fewer in number.

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Well, that just means fewer.

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Why say fewer in number?

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I mean, some of these, you read them and you start to laugh because it's so ridiculous.

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But I can guarantee you that every time I write something, there are probably 15 or 20 of these in a proposal or an early draft, okay?

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And so these are some things that, as I'm really fine -tuning my papers and my proposals, these are the kinds of things that then I turn my attention to is getting rid of this kind of chaff.

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Another kind of dead word is needless repetition of the same idea in different words.

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First priority, well that's a priority.

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Green colored, well what else are you?

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You're green.

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True facts, well those are facts, okay?

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And so we all do this in our writing and

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so this is one of the things

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that I really focus my undergraduate writing students on is getting rid of this kind of stuff from their writing, okay?

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You're seeking to say it in the fewest words possible with the most meaning.

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So a few final thoughts on writing proposals and manuscripts.

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I've already said all these, but let me say them again.

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You need good ideas.

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You need clear, concise writing.

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You need to proofread and edit the material and have someone help you do that.

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I recommend that for everybody.

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Have somebody read your draft.

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You need to revise and revise.

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You need to put it down for a few days, come back to it.

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Don't wait until the last minute to write something, particularly a grant proposal.

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You need a few days to sort of mull it over and come back to it and look at it afresh.

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And so my mantra is that You know, you don't start off, you're not just going to write something that's going to be great.

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You get much better at it by writing and writing and writing.

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And so all of you are early in your careers, you're just starting to write as scientists.

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It is hard at the beginning.

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It gets easier.

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It's not easy, but it gets easier.

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And the more you do it, the better you will be at it.

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When I was a postdoctoral student, I actually spent some of my fellowship money

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and I went to a grant proposal writing workshop just as I was getting ready to start writing my own big grants, my own PI, independent PI grants.

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And it was really instructive because at that point, I'd written some papers.

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I was getting better at that, but I had no idea how to begin writing a grant proposal.

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And sometimes stepping away from your advisor and doing that

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and going to a workshop that's being hosted by somebody who's very experienced can be helpful.

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And I got a set of books from this workshop.

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I still use these books and their template for writing grant proposals

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because it really helped me understand the components of a grant proposal, how to write clearly what should be in your specific aims page.

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It was really important.

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So I had a good experience with that, and I would recommend that you investigate on your campus, Texas A &M, or where you go for your postdoc,

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investigate whether or not there are workshops that are offered on campus or elsewhere that you might attend and go to.

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Many funding agencies will give you an option of fonts to use.

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Don't use the smallest one.

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Your reviewers do not want to read the smallest font

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that the funding agencies will allow you to use it it's hard to read it's annoying

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and i will say that when so i always start off at 12 point font

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and i try to write my proposals in 12 point font i don't always end up in 12 point font

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but don't go down to 10 i don't like to read

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that nobody i know likes to read that

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but anyway the goal here was to figure out how can

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i get this thing down i've got to get down to one page how can i do

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that five lines down I have a whole sentence that I deleted

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that I decided just really wasn't that important

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so I'm talking I had to explain to this funding agency who my research personnel were going to be

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and so I'm talking about the fact

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that my XXX who is my research assistant for four years

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prior to beginning graduate school will do something well I realized they didn't actually need to know all of

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that information it wasn't that important

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when I needed to get down to my page it wasn't really important

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that this person was my research experience assistant for four years before beginning graduate school.

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All that really mattered is that X was in the lab and X was going to train the students.

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So you have to go through and you have to figure out well how important is each statement that I'm making here.

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I have a sentence about halfway down that talks about Ms. X who has contributed to the project by providing evidence.

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Well what did she do?

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She showed something.

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Okay there's an example of one of these Deadwood phrases

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that I've gone and gotten rid of where I had almost an entire sentence dedicated to saying nothing, basically, okay?

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This is the kind of thing that you do when you're working on a grant proposal.

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Once you have your major ideas down, you've got your major experiments outlined, the arguments that you're going to make,

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then you have to go through and get rid of all the stuff that just really doesn't matter.

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Listing off this litany of equipment, well, they don't actually need to know that.

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I've already told them that my lab is equipped for genetics

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and molecular biology and that implies that I have all of these things

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that I've listed like thermal cyclers and a gel imaging system, a spectrophotometer.

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If I'm, if I'm equipped to do experiments then I have these things.

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And so the things that were important

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that I tell them about were the things that were unusual like I have a very special microscope.

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I have some special equipment for working with fruit flies that other labs would not have.

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And that was the equipment that was important to tell them about.

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This proposal was an eight -page proposal.

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Seven of it was actually a description of experiments.

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That seven pages actually came from a 15 -page proposal that I cut down to seven.

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So I really had to think about how am I going to take the same experiments

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and the same ideas and now put them in seven.

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And that is a tough thing to do.

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I just think it's really important to have something either online or on a bookshelf that you can have access to because, you know, I forget how to use a semi -colon, you know, and that kind of thing.

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And so it's good to have those.

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Between, among, affect, effect, I've got a whole list of words

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that I provide to my undergraduates of things that we commonly mess up while we're writing.

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So these writing books that are, you know, either biology or chemistry specific or science specific, we'll help walk you through what does a science CV look like

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and how do you present data in a paper and that kind of thing and talk about interpreting results and statistics.

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Okay, well thank you for coming today, I appreciate your attention.

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162 frases

Vocabulário e dicas de fala para esta lição

Esta aula de conversação de nível C1 usa o vídeo “Science Writing: Practice Makes It (Almost) Perfect”. As palavras que mais se repetem: proposal, writing, grant, write. Este vídeo tem 332 frases e 4628 palavras para praticar shadowing. A fala dura 24:53. O falante fala rápido, cerca de 186 palavras por minuto, então espere sons ligados e reduzidos. 85% das palavras estão entre as 3.000 mais comuns do inglês; vale a pena estudar o restante antes de começar.

Vocabulário principal deste vídeo

As 15 palavras mais avançadas do vídeo, com pronúncia e significado:

Palavra	Pronúncia	Significado
revise verbo	/ɹɪˈvaɪz/	revisar
reviewer substantivo		crítico
spelling substantivo	/ˈspɛl.ɪŋ/	soletração, ortografia
font substantivo	/fɑnt/	fonte, letra
interpret verbo	/ɪnˈtɜː.pɹɪt/	interpretar
undergraduate substantivo		estudante de graduação, graduando
colleague substantivo	/ˈkɒliːɡ/	colega
concise adjetivo	/kənˈsaɪs/	conciso, sucinto
clarity substantivo	/ˈklæɹ.ɪ.ti/	clareza, claridade
outline substantivo	/ˈaʊtlaɪn/	contorno
execute verbo	/ˈɛksɪˌkjuːt/	executar
abbreviation substantivo	/əˌbɹi.viˈeɪ.ʃn̩/	abreviatura, abreviação
jargon substantivo	/ˈdʒɑː.ɡən/	jargão
proofread verbo	/ˈpɹuːfɹiːd/	revisar
equip verbo	/ɪˈkwɪp/	equipar

Phrasal verbs que você vai ouvir

Palavra	Significado
figure out verbo	descobrir, deduzir
go back verbo	voltar
turn out verbo	terminar
go out verbo	sair
mess up verbo	desarrumar, bagunçar

Gramática neste vídeo

As estruturas que o falante mais usa, com as palavras exatas do vídeo:

Estrutura	No vídeo
Present perfect have/has + particípio passado — uma ação passada que ainda importa agora	have been dissuaded · have submitted · you've done
Voz passiva be + particípio passado — o foco está no que acontece, não em quem faz	have been dissuaded · are related · is complicated
Orações relativas who / which + oração — informação extra sobre uma pessoa ou coisa	somebody who writes · somebody who is · doing, which is

Pronúncia para ficar de olho

O falante usa 140 contrações e formas reduzidas, como you're, don't, I'm. Diga-as na forma curta, do jeito que você ouve.

Os sons de “sh” e “zh”: abbreviation /əˌbɹi.viˈeɪ.ʃn̩/, revision /ɹəˈvɪʒ.ən/, afresh /ʌˈfɹɛʃ/, bookshelf /ˈbʊkˌʃɛlf/, contraction /kənˈtɹækʃ(ə)n/
Palavras longas — acerte a sílaba tônica: abbreviation /əˌbɹi.viˈeɪ.ʃn̩/, commonality /ˌkɑ.məˈnæl.ə.ti/, communicator /kəˈmjuːnɪkeɪtə/, grammatical /ɡɹəˈmæt.ɪ.kəl/, iteration /ˌɪt.əˈɹeɪ.ʃən/

Sons difíceis para falantes de português:

Consoante final — sem acrescentar um “i” depois: font /fɑnt/, interpret /ɪnˈtɜː.pɹɪt/, colleague /ˈkɒliːɡ/, execute /ˈɛksɪˌkjuːt/, proofread /ˈpɹuːfɹiːd/
/l/ final — a língua toca o céu da boca, não vira “u”: continual /kənˈtɪnjuəl/, credential /kɹɪˈdɛnʃəl/, grammatical /ɡɹəˈmæt.ɪ.kəl/, postdoctoral /pəʊs(t)ˈdɒkt(ə)r(ə)l/, feasible /ˈfiː.zɪ.bəl/
/h/ — um sopro suave, diferente do “r”: wholeheartedly /ˌhoʊlˈhɑɹtədli/, halfway /ˌhæfˈweɪ/

Como praticar com este vídeo

Ouça o vídeo inteiro uma vez sem falar e anote as palavras que você não conhece.
Comece na velocidade 0,75×, faça shadowing frase por frase e volte à velocidade normal quando ficar fácil.
Grave a sua voz e compare com o original, prestando atenção a palavras como revise, reviewer, spelling.

O que é a Técnica de Shadowing?

Shadowing é uma técnica de aprendizado de idiomas com base científica, originalmente desenvolvida para o treinamento de intérpretes profissionais. O método é simples, mas poderoso: você ouve áudio em inglês nativo e repete imediatamente em voz alta — como uma sombra seguindo o falante com 1-2 segundos de atraso. Pesquisas mostram melhora significativa na precisão da pronúncia, entonação, ritmo, sons conectados, compreensão auditiva e fluência na fala.

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