2 Short Items

Hello. I’m writing to you in the early morning, after returning from the airport. I was dropping off a Mexican researcher who had just finished the intensive course in research writing. I will miss my Mexican colleagues.

This week my blog post consists of 2 short items. First, let me note that 2 chapters from Editing and Publication: A Training Manual are now available as separate files in the AuthorAID Resource Library.

A colleague reminded me that the PDF file for this book was large and so could be slow to download. Therefore I’ve posted separate files for the 2 chapters I especially recommended: “Getting the most out of words” and “Editing for the specialist”. These files are smaller and therefore faster to download.

Second, let me mention a comment posted in response to last week’s blog post. The author of the comment noted, quite correctly, that long words (such as technical words) often are appropriate to use in scientific articles—and thus that readability scores for such articles can appropriately be higher than those for popular writing.

I agree, and I hope you have read or will read the comment and my response. By the way, my response was posted twice, because the first time the formatting was bad. Comparing the copies of my response can help show that good formatting makes things easier to read.

My thanks to the person who reminded me about the PDF file size and the person who wrote the comment last week.

Until next week—

Barbara