科技论文的结尾
Highlights from Chapter 9 in <<Writing Science>> by Joshua Schimel
1.
Ending well is the best revenge.
Endings are power positions. People remember the last thing you say. The resolution should be your “take-home message,” your strongest and most memorable words.
A good resolution shows us how our understanding of nature has advanced, and by offering new insights into the problem identified in the opening, it wraps up the story.
A good resolution achieves this by stepping backward through OCAR: it reiterates the action, answers the questions raised in the challenge, and demonstrates how those answers contribute to the larger problem.
2.
Good resolutions:
Use “In conclusion” road sign to make it easier to navigate through a paper.
3.
Concluding with a question:
Ending with a concrete new question engages a reader’s curiosity and can be a powerful way to resolve a paper.
Example 1: Questions remain regarding how …, what …, and what …
Example 2: It would be interesting to include … into … and to investigate whether … might …
4.
Bad resolutions:
There are several ways to destroy a good paper with a bad resolution. You can be weak, distracting, or, at worst, you can actively undermine your conclusions.
1) Weak resolutions fail to frame the conclusions. In this type of ending, authors usually synopsize their results and then tell you that they are important, but don’t clarify how — they don’t answer the questions they were asking and don’t synthesize their information into knowledge.
2) Some papers conclude with material that is distracting — ideas that should be in the Introduction or is already in textbooks and that neither synopsizes nor synthesizes the results.
A second way a resolution can be distracting is by introducing new information at the end.
5.
Undermine your conclusions:
The worst possible way to end a paper is to actively undermine your conclusions, and yet this may be the most common way to end scientific papers. Many end by saying “more research is needed to clarify our findings.” Resolving a paper this way focuses on what you haven’t accomplished. That is worse than throwing away a power position — it uses that power to weaken your conclusions and your science.
Examples:
- More research is needed
- but the importance of this has yet to be assessed
- we hope that this review will simulate further research to answer the many unanswered questions
- this topic deserves more research
6.
Fix a bad resolution:
Condense your resolution to do three things: (1) synopsize the key results, (2) synthesize those results — show us how they answer your question, and (3) show us what this contributes to solving the larger problem.
If you achieve those three objectives, each clearly and concretely, you will have a strong resolution that ends your paper with maximum punch.