IAP Political Forum

It only got runner-up but still, I thought I'd post it here since I'd mentioned it before.

http://www.remedi.ie/education.php?id=63

Congrats. Only second place. :'(

Apparently mine had better science content but the winner's was a more polished writing style (I haven't read any of the others yet).

That's pretty cool. Genetics promises huge possibilities in the future. It would be a great place to make your career.

Funny how important writing is. You just can't escape the need to be able to construct clear and stylish prose.

That comment plagues me everytime I write.  One of the reasons I went to this forum was to improve my writing. 

Congrats on the essay IamMe.

Believe it or not, there's a book on punctuation that's actually pretty readable. It's called

Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation.
It covers such mysteries as commas and the possessive. Actually a fairly good read, considering the type of book it is.

Some of the most common errors I see are:

• misspelling "its" and "it's." The latter is only used to denote the contraction of "it is." (And should the period be inside or outside the quotation mark? That's something I always have trouble with).
• Their, there, or they're?
• When to use who or whom.

Other than that, the errors I see are just really sloppy sentence structure. However, I understand that many poster here, including at times myself, just type in a stream of consciousness and don't worry much about how correct the wording is.

IAmMe: my suggestion for teaching yourself how to write well is to read good literature. It just kind of soaks in. The other suggestion is to keep taking classes that require you to write papers. Nothing beats that instant feedback.[/list]

Thank you.

That "its" vs "it's" thing used to get me until very recently.[/list]

Since I participated in several debates about GSO and cloning with my students I am kind of expecting that any discussion about genetics and mutations is focused on human genetic diseases. Students seem to find certain things less attractive, like the importance of mutations as a source of intraspecies diversity, genetic engineering for discovering gene function and improving traits in economically important plants and animals, production of cheap drugs... Did you have the max number of words limit?

Nice essay. if I wrote like that, I wouldn't have to sent my papers to US for lecturing. I am surprised that you are allowed to quote wikipedia. I was raised in "cite the original paper" environment.


I use How to write & publish a scientific paper.

Thank you very much. There was a 1000 word limit so there was lots of stuff I had to leave out (I wanted much more discussion on the Precautionary Principle for one thing).