Use PEER to Make Reviewers Say Yes Faster (Full Transcript)

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: 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 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 choices, even more fundamental than that. And today I'm gonna show you exactly 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 like, I've got a good paper here, but it keeps getting rejected. This kind of problem is totally fixable and 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 I've shifted. Instead of pointing the finger at them, I've started to point the finger at myself. Now, 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 the reviewer says, well, you know, Professor Stuckler, this paper needed to do X, Y, Z. I'm like, ah, we actually did X, Y, 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. But again, this is that fixable problem and it's a problem of the writing. So today, what we're gonna cover is you need to step back for a second with me and understand how do reviewers actually read your paper and why that's important. 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. It 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 to publishing success. So I'm gonna introduce our peer writing system. It is going to give you the anatomy of effective paragraphs and a framework that we use inside our FastTrack programs to help clean up your writing. 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, you're gonna rethink and look at your own writing in a different way now and in the future. As ever, 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 submitted a question, I'll take a look. We also have some time live in the chat to go through that. So just saying hey to everybody here. I see Claudio's joining. Hey, Claudio. Ama's saying, I'm waiting. Welcome, Ama, welcome back. I know some of you guys are regulars, so it's always nice to have you with us. So let's step back for a second and dive in here. So, you know, 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 print all these out. I'll go on a plane and I will blast through, no exaggeration, 15 or 20 reviews together. So reading quickly, it could be on a Kindle, a screen. It could be late at night. It 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 just wanna 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? The reviewers 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. So, if they can understand quickly what you did and why it's important and get your methods in a way in their mind, reconstruct your paper, 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, they have to do a whole lot of work to understand you. 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 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 paper better. That doesn't always happen because that takes a whole lot more work to do. And again, this is free volunteer work. 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 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 or clear writing is going to come into play because most of what's going on with the writing that I see is that 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 and writing that I see where the point is hard to get, maybe there's two or three different ideas mushed together, concepts are jumping back and forth, concepts without warning. I'll show you this, 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 is one kind of discrete unit. And this is me trying to draw a hamburger and that doesn't look very good. Well, yeah, that's really bad. Let's do it with like a Sharpie kind of pen. Nope, 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. 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 lettuce and cheese going on here, which are not very good on the keyboard. Anyway, imagine this is like a paragraph, okay? In the paragraph, you want each paragraph to follow a couple of, a few important principles. One is that you want each, oh my days. This whiteboard is definitely not cooperating today. I have to zoom way in here to see this. We'll make this bigger in a second. Something called the one point rule. So we want each paragraph to make one point, no more, no less. And inside your paragraph, that first point, or what we're gonna talk about is this peer system. So that point is the P of the peer system. The 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 wanna 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 helix 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 could be data that illustrate the point commonly. And then you've got maybe, 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 and the point is like the top of the bun, the E, 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 the burgers just overstuffed with stuff. And it makes it very hard, the readers have to do a whole lot of work to figure out what is going on in your paragraph. It's cognitively creating more fatigue for them to understand your paper. And you wanna 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. 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 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 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. I made this example paragraph about writing. So let's take a paragraph. This is something that kind of written in a way that I would commonly see. I'll read it, 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. Let me see, okay. Hopefully you guys can all see this here. All right, so here we go. Here's a paragraph. And if I'm looking at this paragraph, you see that, take a second to read it. I'll read it out loud. Academic writing is a complex skill that many researchers struggle with. There are various reasons why papers get rejected, including unclear writing and poor structure. Smith 2020 found that writing quality affects publication rates, is therefore important for researchers to develop strong writing skills in order to succeed in academia. Yeah, 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. It's almost like writing is 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 really difficult. 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 pure hamburger that we want. I hope this makes sense, 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 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's cognitively taxing. You throw a few of these in your introduction and your reviewer's already like, this is too difficult pile, gonna reject this. Let's try again. So let's try again. Let's take something that Elsa kicked together and show you an example. And again, we'll go through the literature and I'll show you some nice 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. 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 common semantic, but it is one of the most direct levers researchers have for improving their publication rate. Okay, I've made some paragraphs here that were about the theme 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, and why is it easier? You've got a very clear topic sentence. This is a 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 Pierre. Here's my explanation right here of what this suggests that reviewers are making judgments about, blah, blah, blah. And then here's my linking sentence, where that repeating that R, that lower bun of where that's gonna create flow about improving publication rate here. And that's gonna create a flow and momentum into the next paragraph. In this kind of formula is very, very common across fields in academic writing. And like I said, we'll go through some examples in a second. Now, what am I saying? I don't think that this is a writing problem. I think the person who wrote this 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 in my outline is this point. And that lines up to your paragraph topic sentence. It 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, well, how are you gonna have clear thinking structure if you haven't done it? Now, I, right, cards on the table. I said I'm gonna 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. Pure automatically comes to me. But you guys might need to practice this. It's a bit like when I first started playing tennis, I didn't have any lessons and I played for a lot of time on the tennis court. 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 topspin is, how are you gonna be able to spin the ball and achieve the goal you want with your shot? It's the same thing here in riding. You need to understand a riding system. 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, well, now you can get Grammarly and others to fix the non-native English speaker problem. Strip all that away and what you're left with is really the core of what it always was, was this thinking structure problem. Okay, I'm gonna come back to the chat and we'll go through some examples in the literature. So here we go. Minary, hey, good to see you. Minary point, evidence, explanation. Yeah, it's peer. So it's the R in the mnemonic, but exactly, exactly right. S.N. Gay-Tenson asked, where am I located? Right now I am in Milan, but I split my time between Milan and the US. And we're truly quite international here. I bet if we do a roll call, we'll see people from all over the world. I see Andrea's with us. Hey, Andrea. Hey, Claudio. So let me go through a couple of example papers so you can see 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 go. I know this guy, 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. Let's maybe take a look at this one. Yeah, this looks like it could be kind of interesting too. And let's see something else. This one also looks pretty good. So there's quite a few good ones here. Anyway, we can go through multiple of these. I like this literature personally, so I sometimes do comb through this. And one of the professors who works with us, Professor Courtney McNamara, this is her wheelhouse. This is totally her specialty. But let's take a look. Okay, so here we got, this is reflection. Could be anything though. And let's go grab some paragraphs. Okay, this is a nice example. Let me make sure you guys can see the screen. You guys see the screen? No, I think I gotta zoom in a little bit more here. Here's a nice one. Okay, so trade, financial liberalization could offer benefits that improve 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 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, could improve health. Here's another example, improving standards. It's a pretty good example, point, evidence, evidence. And down here is giving some, again, evidence stroke explanation. And here on the other hand is, and now it's going in that line saying, what could be the negative effects? A very 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 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 in 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 wanna bounce back to the chat for a second and see if this is all clear. We got a shout out from a LinkedIn user here from Germany. Hey, welcome. Good to have you with us. I can see our 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? Let me come back to that, Jeff. It's a good question. And this is a good use case. It depends what you're doing. So 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. We don't. So, but that is something you can train with very structured thinking. And it's also a very clean way. It might not be the most exciting way, but it 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. Germany here in the chat. Namibia. Truly international community, guys. Love to see you here. Hit like. That definitely helps the algorithm, as I've learned in going from professor to doing stuff on YouTube. That does help us reach other people. So from the first two examples, Funcho asked a question here. Is it because the first talked about rejection and the citation didn't mention rejection? Oh, okay. You're talking about the examples on the whiteboard. Let me pull that up. I'm really glad you asked that. So, right. So this one here, no, because, 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 were to 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, seven out of 10 researchers report they have never had any actual writing training and were expected to just figure it out. Another study found that when early stage researchers started using the peer system, their writing confidence 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 might unpack this and say, there are various reasons why papers get rejected, including this. The top two reasons are a survey of editors found that the main reason in natural science was, I don't know, X, Y, Z. 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 see people smushing together what should have room to breathe in two or three paragraphs. So, Funcho, does that help 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 not strictly necessary. It can be helpful, but it's not always necessary. You could actually end this paragraph right here, and this would be intact. So this lower button is optional. Just like, you know, you could eat an open-faced sandwich. You don't need both buttons on the burger 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. 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 wanna 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. And if you could 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 with the results, the discussion, the intro, the lit review, whatever you think feels the weakest and maybe is the least clear. And we got another hi from Jamaica. Oh, this might, I think this is Susan. Hey, Susan, just judging your 07.07.07 S-A-M. Where do you guys get these names from? And he's saying this is called coherence. Yeah, you definitely need this coherence. So coherence is a great way to think about it. I'd say as well. Andrea says, I peer review articles while drinking wine. It is definitely one way to maintain work health balance. I'm not an advocate hugely of drinking excessively, although I do have a, 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 sommelier. So that's another, that's for another conversation. 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 things that go into that paragraph are going to 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. Cool, fun show, I'm glad. Guys, I love when you ask these kinds of questions because that makes it so much clearer for other people who are watching here who might have been scratching their head and wondering the same thing. So I'm really glad you asked that. 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 India Bangalore. Welcome. Yeah, it's just a real pleasure to have all of you here and Ed is saying, hey, a fan from Taiwan, studying management, all your steps, you look muscles. Interesting, how do you take a balance between work and health? Well, that's not the one, but research is a hard grind. And there is a parallel here. I do recommend, I have recommended before, grad students go to the gym because if you can mentally gain control and kind of compel your body to do the hard, and push yourself to the limits and recover well, well, not only are you getting great endorphin highs and a lot of good ideas can come in 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 it's that discipline that you develop 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. You train that in the gym. And in some ways, as an academic, you're a mental athlete. I mean, 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 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. And the other degree is kind of conveyor belt, cookie cutter, step one, step two. You do this, you read this book, you learn the material, you regurgitate an exam, you're gonna get a good grade. But suddenly PhD is like, well, welcome to the big world of you've got to produce research at the highest level. Well, there's no roadmap or manual to doing that. I say that, I think it's on our mentorship communities. We've come as close as possible as you can to take 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. And then once you see it, you can't not see it. But yeah, and I'm glad you asked that. I definitely think that some kind of activity, it could be yoga, could just be walking. I personally, as a man, find going to the gym, lifting weights or training to be particularly helpful. And 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, make you more confident, and they'd offer you this pill and say, you can have it for free, would you take it? And I don't know, and no side effects. You probably would. And that pill is exercise. So, okay, I digress. Cool. Cooking, cooking. I love this one. Cooking is a nice one too, Minari. I do, I have had a lot of Italian grandmothers teach me some really good stuff. And that's been a great joy being in Italy. And, you know, given how international we are, maybe inside our FTG community, we've got to ask people to trade some recipes with each other. And Gazala says, love your FTG program. That's cool, that's awesome. Yeah, let me know what you like about it. I always like that feedback because some people say they love the courses, some people say they love the workshops, different things. So thanks. And then Ed says, yeah, I feel like academic papers like self-trading, writing competition. Exactly. 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 as an academic. You're trying to become a leader in your field and you're going to 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 going to know more about your topic than anybody else in the world. You will get to that point. 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. So self-training, academic papers like self-training, writing competition. I like that though. There's definitely something to be, you're definitely onto something really, really quite right there, Ed. And G.P. Kim asks, how could I hone my skills in academic writing for the coherent logics and arguments? So, you know, and I think sometimes it's the writing. Well, this is actually the thinking. So I remember when I got to grad school at Yale and there was a professor, 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, 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. Almost, I imagine like a car mechanic could take an engine and pull it apart, put it back together, diagnose exactly what the issue was, and he could do this intellectually, mentally. And I just, I kind of dreamed, I want to have that kind of clarity and precision in my own thinking. And so, G.P., I don't think you'll necessarily solve this with writing. I think the way to think about the writing is the writing should come after you have done a 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, I actually did that. I don't know if people believe me. I've definitely done this multiple times. It's because the writing is the last 10%. And so if you have everything assembled, you already know what you need to say, you have the data and evidence, it just all, it can all flow. But if you're still trying to figure it out as you're writing, then 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, I mean, there's multiple ones out there. 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 that creates a common language for us to use around writing, but different principles that are out there. You've got to 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 in active rather than passive voice. And I can explain this in another day and another breath 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, then you've got the outline and the structure. And those three ingredients, what you did at the sentence level, what you did at the paragraph level and how you get that structure right, is really kind of the core of our fast track writing system. But yeah, definitely some great books out there. And I'll check that one out too, because I always like to see if there are things we can lift that will help you guys. Okay, so I'm not seeing any recommendations that you guys want to go through more academic articles. That's good. Let me go through the submission we had this week. So let me pull this up. And this was a long one. So I'm just going to paste the whole question onto the whiteboard. And let's take a look together. This was quite long and I've just messed up the formatting. Okay, let's see, this is quite long. 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. 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 who was okay to receive my work, but I could not send it because I'm waiting for the permission from my supervisors, at least for them to review it and provide technical insight about it before submission. The other journals required me to submit attachments and names of authors and addressees, with the condition that every author should be aware of the submission, so I could not submit to both of them. All right, 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. Second, now, why, I mean, I can't go inside their heads and say, why are they not paying attention to you? 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 gonna 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. It could be multiple things going on. 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. But if they are co-authors, you gotta wait for them. And you should not be submitting the same paper to multiple journals at the same time. So I do worry about that. So, is this delay likely to have any repercussion in relation to publication, you ask? This depends. This 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. So I don't know. I wouldn't know without looking at it. If you would upload your paper to the workshop, we can take a look and you can get my personal feedback. That's what the session's for. How long should you continue waiting? Well, given that it's your first manuscript, not to be mean, but I have almost never seen someone never write a manuscript before, write their first manuscript, and that was good to go out the door. 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 farther 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. 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 ChatGPT for that because that's the most commonly used one, but the idea is to reverse engineer what, we know over half the papers are using AI in their peer reviews now because it's unpaid work. 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 for peer review. I found AI use cases for a lot of things for me actually takes me longer than not using AI, but you need to be prepared. So that would be something you can do in the absence of feedback. Hope that helps. And then this also worries me because you said you started working on your research proposal. So typically you'll have your research proposal typically coming after, sorry, before, and your manuscript comes after that. So I'm glad you watched the peer style and the did and found style. We'll let her reach up to us all. Very good. That's very good. Did plus found style is kind of, you wanna take in your literature review or did plus found style, you wanna 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's what that formula is. How long should the paragraph be skipped? 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 repeating that other bun of peer 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. I mean, I think you need to get yourself. I mean, look, I'm biased, of course. 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, 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 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. But yeah, I mean, this to me tells me you're looking for some kind of support out there. 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 to find co-authors, colleagues, and mentors. So don't sit there passively and hope good things will come to you. Now's the time to be proactive. So thanks for sharing that with us. 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 send you guys off to have a great weekend. So we've got Bungie001 says, hey, Prof, it's Bungie. I want to publish a conference paper for a very niche conference. Max length is five papers. I'm guessing this is maybe a computer science or AI conference paper because they're publishing conferences is more important. What else? What should I do or do differently? Five pages is so little. This always reminds me of how Hemingway said, sorry to a friend. Sorry, I wrote you a long letter. I didn't have time to write a short one. Yeah, 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, having a lean outline that makes your points, being lean with your tables and figures, probably can't have a ton of tables and figures in there. And often you'll see this. Some papers like Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, they'll put all the methods in an appendix. 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 in 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. You're probably gonna wanna cite that anyway in your introduction to establish how you added value and you went beyond that paper. 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, especially as you're carving it up. And of course the journal or conference itself will have their own guidelines on what they wanna see. Sometimes in a granular way, they'll say what subsections they want, even what subtitles they want, what length they want for the various sections. So definitely consult that guide. But yeah, my guess is you're in some kind of computer science or AI or other field that places a premium on conference papers. And if that's the case, a short manuscript is fine. I mean, even in medical journals, often you'll see manuscripts that are 3000 words in length, which is not very long, it's same sort of deal. So yeah, I prefer shorter manuscripts overall. Okay, Jeff says, 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. 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 wanna make sure you don't miss anything, you could do it that way. You could say, hey, can you make an outline? But you gotta be really clear when you make an outline, an outline for what? Out of your notes, you could probably spit a bunch of different outlines. So you don't want Gen AI to do the thinking for you. But if you say, you have this argument you want to make, help me synthesize this into the most linear outline, that's a good way to go. Alternatively, I like you having an outline, right? You want to know that, in your paper, you wanna know the direction. You wanna know where you wanna finish. Before, when you get in a car, unless you have a lot of time to kill, you usually know where you're going. You're not just taking the car for a spin. So I find this will get messed up if you don't kinda know where you want to finish. So I think you'll get better success out of using Gen 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? Can you help me refine my outline? That could be quite useful. And I think AI can be really great if you have a whole bunch of notes and you don't wanna 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 a 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 and just sticking to the article set that I have uploaded there. So that really helps me in constructing, write 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, in Notebook LM, which is 100% free, that can really help me say, have I missed a quote or anything that could help reinforce the gap here or kind of a good factor figure about why this conversation is so important right now. 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 you out and 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. You need to give it a little bit more about what purpose, what you're trying to achieve, what the paper's for, to get the best result. So there we are. Okay, Maynari says, I'm an early researcher. What's the best advice 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're saying you wanna 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 mentioned a moment ago and you don't wanna 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 they did this important contribution that got us to here, but have yet to, but they suggested future research would be needed to do the following. So even better if you could say that they said they need what your paper's gonna then go on to do. So you wanna 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 wanna kill your paper. I hope that was, I'm not 100% sure I was trying to decipher your question. I hope that makes sense. And Bungie says, yeah, battery energy storage systems. Yeah, exactly. So Bungie, you're probably just gonna have mainly some figures showing your system and articulating your results, like what you did and what you found quite clearly. Five pages is tight. You're not gonna have extensive lit review at all. You'll probably have an introduction that's just three paragraphs. Spend a little more heavy duty time on your methods and results and a short conclusion. But yeah, happy to take a look if you share that in future sessions. Gazella 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? 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 gotta do is maybe figure out what your topic is. I'd watch dissertation planning 101. It was last week's live. That will help you in this planning. And of course, Gazella, if you have access, go through our dissertation blueprint course. It's gonna make sure you follow all the right steps and get that planning in place. So right, just recalling, some of you saw this last week, supervisor alignment test, scope, existing dissertations, past dissertations, and calibrate yours to theirs. Get in your topic neighborhood with our convergence method. Make sure that you want to publish, or if not, you know what your end goal is. If you just wanna tick the box and get it done, that's gonna change things. If you do wanna publish, then you need to take the step to find a publishable gap, right? Notice you haven't been writing anything yet. And all this is a dissertation plan. This is a thesis plan. So I won't go through the rest of that, Gazella, 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 glossed past some of those fundamental dissertation planning steps. So Luca, shout out from Nigeria. Cool, guys. This is a lot of fun. I'm gonna have to do this kind of roll call. Where is everyone internationally? It's such a blessing for me to be able to 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, 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. Minari, glad that helps. And Gazala's saying you got a topic and you like to publish. That's awesome. Yeah, Gazala, I'd encourage you to submit to the workshop. Maybe more specific so we can get into it and help convert what 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 the next workshop here on Friday, happy to take a look, or in our private workshops that we've got five of them a week. It's also a great place to do that. So 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 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 and address it? And that's what I wanted, what I try to do here live with you guys is think aloud so you can get a window into my own thought process and hopefully you'll benefit in 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 Eddie before, or a glass of wine on a plane, some of you, or a nice stroll in the park. But yeah, have a great weekend and I will look forward to seeing you, same place, same time.