Emily - Chapter 5

[RohanAlexander]

Chapter 5

Theory

• Excellent discussion of getting to a quick first draft and using the expected paper structure to create an automatic outline. A few additional thoughts:
• For writing beyond academic papers (unless this is out of scope), would it be worth discussing the merits of writing a good outline before writing anything? Similar to the ‘Plan’ stage of analysis, I think people often jump into writing without planning
• This could be enhanced with a discussion of how literate programming interacts with the writing process. Do you recommend people write their paper section by section as they do an analysis or wait until the end? Should they recognize that the more they draft to capture their thought process in analysis the more this “maps onto” a paper outline/draft?
• “It is especially important to brutally remove everything that does not contribute to the story” - I think this is critically important, and “pruning” of a paper could merit a longer discussion and some suggestions of how to approach
• I learned a lot from the ‘Data First’ versus ‘Question First’ framing. This is a lovely framework!
• This chapter generally shines through its use of compelling real-world examples. I know I’ve looked back on my undergraduate papers in horror realizing how much I was copying the writing style taught in high schools (five paragraph essay) versus an academic style due to lack of exposure. It’s invaluable to see things done right.

Technology

• When mentioning leaving TODOs for yourself in drafting, you could mention that these are easy to find again with Ctrl+Shift+F in RStudio (searches whole project), the todor package, or similar TODO Tree extension in VS Code