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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   2198 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for May 31, 2024

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Scientific papers already do this; the abstract is almost always first and it does exactly what you want.

Yes, some ideas do need to be slow-rolled (or the audience has to be primed), but that’s also so exceptional a case that it might as well not exist and even that doesn’t need to blow the twist if you do it correctly.

Most scientific and academic papers I read don’t do this though. The abstract only says their conclusion for a few criteria, sometimes only in general terms. The discussion or results section you’ll often find more complete conclusions and a lot of sentences that contain words like “surprisingly”, “unexpectedly”, “interestingly”, “one noteworthy finding”. That’s a lot of information that should be front and center rather than buried in the discussion section.

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