Efficient Scholarly Writing Brian McKenzie October 20, 2004

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Efficient Scholarly WritingBrian McKenzie
October 20, 2004
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Overview

• Research agenda
• Proposal recipe
• Organizing literature
• Bibliographic software
• Templates
• Microsoft Office writing style

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Research Agenda

• Tracks the development of your research stream
• Lets you know what to work on next
• Reminds you of deadlines

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Proposal Recipe

• Is this idea worth developing?
• Is it interesting? (Davis 1971)
• Does it fit within my research agenda?
• Is there an insurmountable obstacle in completing
  this research project?
• This recipe was developed by Andrew Van de Ven

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Organizing Literature

• Scholarly writing is the art of saying something
  new using other peoples words
• Scholarly articles
• Books
• Where in the book was that quote?
• Books are cheap
• ABE Amazon
• Which library did you get that book from?

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Bibliographic Software

• Tracks your personal library
• Downloads citations
• Allows you to search your existing literature
• Easily tracks citations while writing
• Creates reference or bibliography sections of
  your paper

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Templates

• Allows speedy formatting to known submission
  guidelines
• Develops paper as an object of art
• Readily tracks finished page count
• Saves time

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Microsoft Office Writing Style

• Most of us use computers as smart typewriters
• MS Office Writing Style allows
• Speedy formatting
• Switching between outline and normal views
• Automatic Table of Contents creation
• Indexing