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Writers on Writing, Writing as Thinking

Short Notes Help

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by Yikun Chang

According to my experience, writing is an effective way to help collect ideas, categorize them, and find logical relationships among them. Nowadays, Electronic Design Automation (EDA) tools are highly convenient. However, this fact is a double-edged sword. We become more and more dependent on simulation, and even overwhelmed by it. We sit in front of computers, set up all conditions, and then click “run.” After a while, we collect data and find something not that good. Then we adjust parameters slightly and re-run the simulation. This cycle repeats and repeats until we get lost in simulation and restart the whole flow. Fast simulation makes us little cherish the chances of running simulation, lazy to write down the simulation results, and barely spend time on carefully thinking about our design. Due to this kind of sad experience, I have learned to keep notes about research no matter how meaningless an idea or the data looks. Every time I feel lost in research, I look back at my notebook to re-organize my thoughts with some symbols like arrows or brackets. In this way, writing as well as thinking at the same time helps me figure out where the current problem comes from, and what I should focus on next. The record of the data that you previously think not important may help save a lot of time when you someday find it actually means something or need to compare it with new data.

close reading

Drama in an EE paper

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I will first not-completely-but-somewhat-jokingly say that this article’s first author is a past student of EE 295, so of course he’d be doing lovely things with his writing! (I will add that he was a good writer when he started in EE 295, and that his advisor’s students are often excellent writers. The advisor is the third author on this paper. A culture of good writing, of valuing writing, seems to develop in some labs.)

This July 2015 article is “Variable-Length Convolutional Coding for Short Blocklengths With Decision Feedback” by Adam R. Williamson, Tsung-Yi Chen, and Richard D. Wesel. Since it is so recent, I will only photograph one short excerpt from the text, although somewhat more will be cited and described.

Drama is developed from the first sentence, when the authors write something along the lines, of “Although the founding father of our field found that feedback was not useful for x, feedback can be used for other purposes”:

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If that’s not dramatic, then what is? It’s dramatic when an important figure in the field is right, or wrong, or just missed noticing something important.

The way that Einstein’s thoughts on the cosmological constant have been cited and argued for and against is perhaps similar. He was right. He was wrong. (Maybe there we even some other back-and-forths, and certainly there were many amendments.) Then, a January 2013 Scientific American called “Right Again, Einstein!” starts, “A new study of one of the universe’s fundamental constants casts doubt on a popular theory of dark energy” (Moskowitz). Almost three years later (Sept 2015), “What Einstein Got Wrong” in that same magazine begins: “Like all people, Albert Einstein made mistakes, and like many physicists he sometimes published them” (Krauss). There’s something exciting and important about great thinkers having limitations, even if they might just be limitations caused by the moment of time in which they lived, and the development of their fields at that moment.

The extensive literature review of the Williamson et al. paper tells a story, too. It’s chronological: this idea was developed, and then that, and then this other one went further. It’s also got characters; the researchers are listed by their names, rather than the papers being listed by reference numbers. Once there are names, some intellectual drama can be introduced: all these authors did stuff in reaction to the work that came before: one name does “pioneering work,” another “formalizes it” or “demonstrates” something else, or “furthers” or “extends” the work. Others “study” or “show” or “provide an overview.” It’s complicated, but there are a lot of people doing stuff, cooperating even, and that’s interesting and appealing.

Fiction, Introductions: Plans and Hopes

Storytelling Elements in EE Writing: Personification

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My students give me at least as much homework as I give them.

In yesterday’s class, the elements of storytelling were doubted to be of importance in technical writing, or even academic engineering writing. So I’m looking for examples.

Here’s one, in the first article I brought up on my screen, an award-winning June 2000 article by Vítor H. Nascimento and Ali H. Sayed, “On the Learning Mechanisms of Adaptive Filters.”

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Notice the way that adaptive filters are personified in their introduction. They “adjust themselves to an ever-changing environment,” they have a “learning curve,” a “learning process,” and “learning capabilities.” An adaptive filter “reacts.” They are like humans or other species adapting to a habitat.

After seeming to personify adaptive filters, Nascimento and Sayed develop a nurturing relationship with them. The next paragraph of the introduction reads:

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Nurturing in their readers a warm feeling for adaptive filters, the authors say that “special care” must be taken with them (as with human children). “Interpreting learning curves” might be much more mathematical when it comes to adaptive filters, but these authors “care” for the slow and fast learners both, and, like a supportive and patient kindergarten teacher, they believe that slow learners end up “’smarter’” than they appear at first.

Writers on Writing, Writing as Thinking

Researching without writing is like chewing without swallowing (or swallowing without chewing)

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by SV

As scientists, we love to get caught up in our work. We spend countless hours in our own heads, sporadically jotting down notes on the back of an envelope or a nearby white board only to throw the envelope away or erase the board the next day. The most common justification for this sort of behavior is that ”science takes time” and ”research should never be publication focused.”

The truth of the matter is: We are lazy. It is very easy to justify a day spent doing nothing if we can blame it on this one problem we have been stuck on for months. Rather than focus our thoughts and put them on paper, we prefer to leave them as evasive thoughts in our head. Every paper I have ever written began a couple of weeks before the deadline. There was always some problem that I had been struggling with for months, but given that the due date was mere days away, I had no choice but to start writing, in the hopes that the issue would resolve itself through some sort of miracle.

And it always did. Only it wasn’t a miracle. After a couple of these kinds of occurrences, I realized that my ability to perfectly align solutions with deadlines had nothing to do with luck, faith, or countless hours spent in the middle of the night. It was the very motion of writing. See, by typing out my thoughts, pouring my heart and frustration onto a piece of paper, I suddenly had a new perspective.

So my advice to every one who is struggling with that one detail in their proof is: Write it out. Not on the back on envelope. Not on the white board. Type it up like you’re about to submit it to your dream journal. Get the template. Make nice figures. You will soon feel like a reviewer rather than an author. And that perspective might just be all it takes.

close reading

Close Reading Gabor

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If you bought the EE 295 Sketchbook, then you can (if you choose) review topics such as the types of sentences (simple, compound, complex, and compound complex), the ways good paragraphs are put together (with thesis or topic sentences, moving from simpler sentences to more complex ones and then back, and with coherence), and even the ways that sentences can be written to connect to one another helpfully within paragraphs (“connectivity”). Reading for the authors’ rhetorical choices is a new way of seeing, but I think it’s one of the most useful skills to improve your writing over your whole career.

One other thing to take into account, since we’ll be looking at introductory paragraphs, is that the beginning of a journal article tends to establish common ground, state a problem, and explain the writer’s response.

With all that in mind, let’s look at some examples from journal articles in the field.

Gabor’s classic article, “The Theory of Communication” (1946), starts like this:

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Notice, of course, how the very first paragraph is straightforward: “the purpose of this study” and the organization of the article are immediately specified. The first sentence is long, but it is just a simple sentence: the purpose is to present a method. All the rest are added phrases. The second sentence is complex, but it’s not a difficult one to figure out. There’s a dependent clause (starting with “while”) and then the main, independent clause.

The second paragraph then moves to one of the main goals of any introduction: establishing common ground. But what else does Gabor achieve here? The paragraph reads as as a short, short review article. This works to establish the writer’s authority. And it’s orderly; it’s a chronological story of how one idea develops off of another. After the first sentence or two, every other one begins with a time period. Usually the main subject is the researcher. Then there are specific and varied verbs: “disproved,” “discovered,” generalized.”

And let me emphasize that it’s a story, a narrative, which is an easy way for readers to process information. The engineers become characters in this story, which make the story easier to understand than if the subjects of the sentences were the inanimate “principles,” “claims,” and “convictions.”

Notice that the first two sentences do start with these inanimate subjects, and this is probably to establish the subject of the whole paragraph: principles of transmission. Notice, too, that the paragraph ends with these words, too; the final sentence contains both “transmitted” and “transmission.” It’s hard to get too far off track when reading this paragraph.

I’ll look at other paragraphs from other articles in future posts.

Forum, intellectual property and plagiarism, Writers on Writing

Mixed Messages on Plagiarism

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By Dr. Sarah Gibson

I don’t want to be a downer…but the thing that has been on my mind lately regarding academic writing is plagiarism. I found a paper back in 2012 that plagiarized one of my papers. I guess it was not particularly egregious–they didn’t steal my data and try to pass it off as their own, but they did paraphrase (very poorly, like replacing a few words with synonyms while keeping the sentence structure) several sentences and paragraphs of mine without citing me. In doing so they essentially stole my ideas. I followed the IEEE guidelines for reporting plagiarism, but to my disappointment the editor of the journal that published the offending paper “disagreed” with me that this case constituted plagiarism, and went so far as to say that, if anything, I should be happy that the authors agreed with my arguments! I thought, am I taking crazy pills? So I showed it to the director of the UCLA Graduate Writing Center who also showed it to the director of UCLA Writing Programs,  both of whom agreed that this was textbook plagiarism. At the time, I was wrapping up my PhD, getting ready for my defense, and looking for a job, so I didn’t have time to pursue it further. But it has always been in the back of my mind, so last November I decided to bring up the issue again with the new editor of the same journal. He sent the case to the journal’s Plagiarism Committee, but they refused to hear my case because they said that my complaint had not changed and had already been addressed by the previous editor.

Needless to say, I’m furious. All my life (well, since middle school, probably), all my teachers have put the Fear of God in me about plagiarism, warning me that it is a crime so serious that it could get me kicked out of school, ruin my career, or worse. As such, I’ve taken great pains in my own writing to give proper credit where credit is due, and to be very careful when paraphrasing (even when I am giving proper credit!). So when I am wronged, at the very least I would expect IEEE to have my back. It is so unbelievable to me that they won’t stand up for me–won’t defend the very idea of intellectual property (wrong term?) at all.

One thing that both Directors did point out was how every country/culture (I know you hate slashes! but I used one anyway!) has a different idea about what constitutes plagiarism vs. “common knowledge”, and that this makes the issue much more complicated, since the papers are being written by authors from all across the world, and even the journal editors and IEEE committee members are from all different cultures.

The main purpose of this post is to express my shock and disappointment at this event. But if you have any suggestions for how to proceed, I would love to hear them. I do have a couple more ideas: (1) contact the editor of the plagiarized journal (rather than the plagiarizing journal). This is not IEEE protocol, but maybe they would have my back? (2) Find an IEEE fellow to write a letter on my behalf. (3) Go to the press with a scathing expose.

 

 

Forum, Writers on Writing

Your writing process

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What is your writing process?

When and where do you like to write, and why?

What sort of on-going writing to do you, as you think and do research?

How do you know that it’s time to start writing a more formal article (a conference paper or journal article)?

How do you prepare to write?

What do you work on first?

As you’ve gotten more experience, what are the most important things you’ve learned about writing or your particular writing process?

interdisciplinary thinking, Reading Recommendations

Cross-disciplinary thinking, and a crazy suggestion

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The EE department set up a class called “technical writing,” but discussions with some EE faculty suggest that another main goal is related to your getting a more  liberal education. The assumption seems to be that inputs from other fields can inspire and fertilize the minds of engineers. The class changes from quarter to quarter, but this goal explains why I assign a nonfiction public science book during some quarters; it explains two quarters that included Jacob Bronowski’s The Ascent of Man; it explains our improvisational games, too.

One of my experiences this summer has only increased my interest in and valuation of cross-disciplinary thinking. I worked at a summer camp for a week, a summer camp that draws in children and teens who love certain books about alternative worlds and then builds on their interests in reading, fantasy, science fiction, technology, role-playing, writing, and art and encourages them to combine all those interests, along with “design thinking,” to imagine the future. When I was there, I happened to be reading Neal Stephenson’s new novel, Seveneves, in which he spends most of the book describing a surprising future—and particularly all the technology that lets humankind survive the destruction of the earth.

This type of imagining, whether in the service of entrepreneurial opportunity or science fiction, seems worth devoting some of your attention to. Whether or not you espouse the singularity—I don’t, quite, but the Camp Director thinks it’s arriving in the next 15-35 years, which I hope will be within all our lifetimes—technological change is happening faster and faster. And with that, in spite of the ways cultures and traditions try to pump the brakes on drastic behavioral change, contemporary societies are changing surprisingly quickly, too. How to prepare?

Well, there may be no specific way to prepare for unknown changes, but all you creative electrical engineers can probably succeed in this situation. At camp, I asked my writing students to imagine a future, and one told the story of a boy using his iPhone as a hovercraft and matter generator (not just a 3D printer!). I assume this is impossible, but I am also sure it’s limited thinking. Why just try to improve an iPhone? Why not imagine a society beyond that, where iPhones seem as obsolete as my flip phone does now? What will replace them? What do people—you!—fantasize about being able to do now, but you can’t? And what will enable that?

Since we were sitting on a beautiful beach while writing, two students wrote short poems about the sea, the birds, the rocks, and the boats. And then they moved from there, imagining a future in which readers would not be able to interpret their poems, since humans no longer had access to this natural setting. That got them going, and the next step (if they’d had more time) would have been to imagine ways to prevent this from happening. Are there technological means to enable more rather than less human interaction with the complexity and beauty of nature? How can technology reduce mediation, or environmental degradation, rather than increase it?

In short, start jotting down some fantasy fiction, and see where it takes you as an engineer.

Some further reading:

The books and “fandoms” these kids love: Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson series, Doctor Who and Sherlock (from BBC television), Scott Westerfield’s Leviathan trilogy, Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games trilogy, Avatar: The Last Airbender and The Legend of Korra (related tv series), and others (including, of course, J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books). You might enjoy reading some of these yourself!

One article on Neal Stephenson’s contributions to scientific vocabulary and research is Gray Scott’s “Interdisciplinary Sage” in Tomorrow Through the Past: Neal Stephenson and the Project of Global Modernization (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2006):

Fiction, Reading Recommendations

“The Diamond Age” by Neal Stephenson

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This is feminist science fiction, among many other things, and I highly recommend it. Before the iPad, Neal Stephenson imagined the interactive book-like thing he calls A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer. Apple sells the “Raise an Excellent Child Bundle” of apps , and so perhaps Stephenson’s not far off the mark. But instead of giving dietary advice to parents and suggesting mathematical video games for small children, Stephenson’s nanny-book is both artificially intelligent (adapting to the temperaments and experiences of its reader) and taps into real-time human actors’ voices and judgments. Made for one spoiled grand-daughter of a successful entrepreneur, and purloined for one rash daughter of a creative engineer, the books end up raising an abused and low-income girl and another million orphan girls—who together try to save the world from artificial intelligence that does not require human interface and being led by conscious human desire. At least I think that’s what happens! I’m reading it again soon, because it’s so interesting and also complex.

Introductions: Plans and Hopes

An initial dedicated registration period

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I’m sending out queries to my past EE students, asking if they want to join the site.

If you register, then I can send you a password, and you can start writing “posts.” These do not need to be short essays, as mine tend to be. They can be questions, topics for discussion, and other requests or ideas. I will review them, and then put them up. They do not go up immediately,  so if you want to send me a message in the post about how you want to be identified (or not) on the website, or any other message, that will work. You can also say if you want the post public (anyone can read it) or more private (I think this means for contributors only).

If you are someone other than a past student of mine, you can start the registration process, and then (at that time) I will communicate with you about your interest in the site. The site is mainly intended for past students who might want some private collaboration, but at the mome