I was recently asked to participate in a panel discussion related to careers in information and computing technologies by the University at Albany student chapter of ASIS&T. I’m making my slides from the talk as well as a PDF of my disciplines model available for anyone who may be interested.

Every programmer and programming language has a preferred variation on how to format code. Here are my best suggestions for the languages I tend to code.

• Use spaces, not tabs. The definition (display width) of a tab can vary from one editor and platform to the next. A space is always a space.
• Use two (2) spaces to indent a block of code.
• Always wrap code blocks with curly braces { } even if they’re optional for a single line of code. Someone will, eventually, want to add a second line of code to the block and will, as a rule, forget to add the curly braces.
• The opening curly brace of a block should be on the same line as its opening statement.

      public String getFirstname () {
      while (i < 5) {
  

• The closing curly brace should be on its own line.

      }
  

• Leave a blank line after closing a block of code (including the end of a method), unless followed immediately by another closing curly brace.

              }
            }
          }
  

• Place a comment after closing a block of code when there’s a series of closing curly braces.

              } // if
            } // method
          } // class
  

• always put one (1) space before and after binary operators.

      x = x + 5;
      while (i < 5) {
  

• Put one (1) space before the opening parenthesis and after the closing parenthesis in statements (for, while, if, and so on) or function calls.

      for (int i = 0; i < 100; i = i + 1) {
      while (x != 2) {
      if (isPrime (n)) {
      sin (5)
      getPrice ()
  

• Indent each new code block.

      for (int i = 0; i < 100; i = i + 1) {
        if ((i % 2) != 0) {
          if (isPrime (i)) {
            System.out.println (i);
          } // if
        } // if
      } // for
  

• Use the variable naming convention used in your language of the moment: camelCase or under_scores.
• Use meaningful variable and method names. For method names, verbNoun them.

      numStudents
      totalVacationDays
      getFirstname ()
      computeSalary ()
  

• Use single letter variable names iff the letter reflects a standard (recognizable) convention.
  • i, j, k for an index (counter) variable
  • x, y, z for coordinates in 3-space
  • a, b, c for coefficients
  • m, n for the number of items in a collection
  • r for the radius of a circle
  • w, h for the width and height of an object
• Use ALL_UPPERCASE for constants (fixed values, like PI)
• Use white space to make your code more readable.
• Comments should describe why you’re doing something, not how. The code tells me how you’re doing it.

I spend a fair amount of time linking PDF documents to records in Endnote. Unfortunately, Endnote requires you to (a) drag and drop, or (b) navigate into submenus to link to a PDF.

In OS X, you can bind a keystroke to any menu item in a specific application using the System Preferences > Keyboard & Mouse settings. Use this to your advantage! Endnote lacks a keystroke for “Link to PDF…”, so I created one: Command-Option-L

Now, when I highlight a record in my library and press the key combination, an “Attach…” file dialog box opens up and I select the PDF of the article, web site, etc.

To set this up, go to your System Preferences and select the Keyboard & Mouse settings:

Then, select Application Keyboard Shortcuts and click the plus sign to add a new key binding:

Select Endnote as the application and enter the text of the menu item to activate exactly as it appears in the menu in Endnote (presently, the menu item reads, “Link to PDF…”). Then, click in the Keyboard Shortcut field and press the key combination you want to active that menu item (in my case, COMMAND-OPTION-L). Click the Add button, and close the System Preferences.

Finally, quit Endnote (if it’s running) and relaunch it. Highlight any record and press the key combination you used above. You should see the “Attach…” dialog box appear. You can now attach a PDF to the citation record as you normally would.

Enjoy!

We often find ourselves commenting on students’ writing and acting as editors rather than critical readers: we indicate line-level edits, such as missing commas and poor word choices– as if fixing the mechanical errors would make the paper acceptable. In reality, most student papers we see are first drafts, often written the night before the assignment is due and unedited by anyone, including the author. (See my post concerning the design of assignments, coming soon.)

Most of us have students submit work in manuscript format: one inch margins on all sides, double-spaced. This format invites us to comment in-line and act as editors, when really we should be reading and commenting at the level of concepts! If a paper doesn’t have a theme or defined structure, fixing all of the commas and dangling prepositions will not make it better. Marking up the student’s paper to indicate corrections like comma use gives them the false idea that fixing those minor things will make it a better or acceptable paper.

We need to provide the right type of feedback at the right time. First drafts shouldn’t be edited for mechanics; they should be read for concepts. Comments on later drafts, as work approaches completion, can focus on mechanics, which can often be addressed by peer-feedback.

To re-enforce this for both students and myself, I have first drafts of student papers submitted using single-spacing and very large margins: three inches right and four inches bottom. This format is easy to achieve using modern word processing software, leaves plenty of room for me to write concept-level feedback on each page, and deprives me of the inter-line space needed to offer mechanical corrections!

I ask students to submit their final papers (after one or more rounds of re-writing) in standard manuscript format: one inch margins and double spaced.

First year graduate students often struggle with the volume of reading required. It’s not uncommon to have assigned hundreds of pages a week on a range of topics. The typical course may cover the contents of a half-dozen books and 75-100 academic papers. All of this you’re meant to consume, understand, and synthesize with everything you know. The task is, to say the least, daunting.

It doesn’t have to be so difficult to read academic works; people make simple reading mistakes that are easily corrected.

The first reading mistake people make is reading like they learned to read. Most people learned to read stories and found a love of reading in some fiction genre such as science fiction, mystery, romance, or novels. The defining characteristic of fiction from the perspective of reading is that you don’t want to know the ending before reading the whole work. You want to be held in suspense for as long as possible so that you can invest your emotions in the characters and events presented. As readers we know that, and we avoid flipping to the last chapter for fear of spoiling the book.

This is exactly the wrong way to read nonfiction, particularly academic writing. The purpose of academic reading is understanding, not suspense. In contrast to reading a mystery story, in academic papers and books, it’s all about the ending: did the experiment succeed, did the author make her point, what was the point, and so on.

Imagine for a moment that I give you a mystery story I wrote. You dutifully read the book from front to back and (properly) tell me that it was engaging and had you up all night reading. I then ask you whether the evidence I presented in the story was consistent and properly supported the conclusion that the butler did it. You would have no idea. Your notion of the “evidence” would be foggy at best, simply because, as you were reading, you didn’t know what counted as evidence or what conclusion it was meant to support. To evaluate the evidence, you would have to re-read the book with the ending in mind.

Now, imagine a different way to read. I give you the same mystery story except this time I tell you at the outset that the butler did it because he loved his employer’s spouse, whom he’d known since college. Now I ask you the same question: is the evidence I present consistent and does it support the butler conclusion? Then you begin reading. With this approach, you know what to look for, you can tell which content is meant to distract, which is meant as subtle clue, and which is flawed. If I mention somewhere in the story that the butler never went to college, you know it to be a lie or an error. With the previous approach, you had no such insight and would have missed the importance of the claim.

What a difference this makes! Even had I asked you to read the last chapter, rather than giving away the ending so directly, the last chapter would have taken you perhaps 10 minutes to read. You would then know who did it and why, putting you in an excellent position to then read the book and evaluate the evidence. In other words, by reading the ending first, you make yourself a better critical reader.

The second mistake readers make is reading like an editor, rather than reading like a critic. When you read as an editor, you notice punctuation errors, typos, poor turns of phrase, incorrect word choice, and so on. In short, you’re looking at the characters on the page in fine detail and exerting a great deal of effort in the process.

Reading as a critic requires that you look past the structural issues and focus on the concepts presented. This is made easier by reading the ending first, since you then have a framework for understanding the importance of what’s presented. Finding yourself repeatedly annoyed by the author’s use of “which” when “that” would have been preferred does not help you to understand the significance or validity of the work. You have to look beyond style and focus on concepts.

My approach to reading like a graduate student involves some common sense solutions to these issues. The result is that I spend less time reading, I understand more, and I enjoy reading more.

1. The middle doesn’t matter — the meaning is at the ends. Read the first and last sections before reading the rest of the work. For a book chapter, read the introduction and the summary. For a paper, read the abstract, the introduction, and the conclusion. The work wasn’t written from beginning to end, so why should you read it that way? (This should take no longer than 5-10 minutes.)

2. Write a brief of the author’s intentions. Write a single paragraph summary in your own words of what the author is trying to accomplish in the paper: what is the central question the author is addressing? (This should take no more than 1-2 minutes.)

3. The evidence is in the middle. You should expect the middle of a work to contain several presentations of evidence, each of which supports or fails to support the author’s conclusion. Find the evidence.

4. Evaluate the evidence. Since you know the point the author is trying to make, you also know how to evaluate each piece of evidence:

4a. Does it support or fail to support the conclusion? (put a little + or – in the margin)
4b. Is it true/valid/sound? (put a T, an F, or a ? in the margin)
4c. Is it convincing?
4d. What counterexamples can you come up with?
4e. Has the author addressed the counterexamples?

5. Evaluate the piece. Is the sum of the evidence enough support for the author’s conclusion?

6. Synthesize. Think about how the current piece relates to other works you’ve read and things you know and believe.

Understand that every academic discipline has a different standard for what counts as true/valid/sound evidence. In the hard sciences, you typically need numerical data including statistical analyses, while in journalism you need to multi-source your “facts” (in the social sciences, we refer to this as triangulation). You should know or ask someone who knows what counts as evidence in your discipline.

As a final side note, consider using a citation/quotation manager to help you keep track of what you’ve read. Endnote, BibTex, RefWorks, and many others are available. The purpose of these tools is to record titles, authors, and notes about works you’ve read. In most cases, the tools also help you produce properly formatted citations for insertion into papers you write. Check out other articles I’ve posted for suggestions on maximizing the benefits of these tools.

Endnote is primarily intended to help you store citation information and create bibliographies for your academic papers, but it also allows you to collect PDFs of the documents. This is helpful for journal articles, and fantastic for dynamic content.

When reading online articles or web pages that you might need to cite, print to PDF and attach the PDF file to your Endnote record. On Mac OS X, this capability is built-in to the Print dialog. In Windows, you’ll need to install software that allows you to print to PDF.

The purpose of a citation is to allow your readers (and you) to relocate the material you use as evidence in your writing. By keeping a PDF of web pages as you saw them, you have the exact material on which you’re basing your quotations and interpretations. In other words, you (and your critics) have access to the version you’re relying on, even if it’s later changed significantly.

This is particularly important when the material you’re citing changes frequently, such as newspaper articles and political websites.

There are many versions of camcorder available, each with benefits and shortcomings. I most often use camcorders to record interviews, focus groups, and other events from a fixed vantage point. So, your needs my may differ significantly from mine.

Top Loading
While mounted on a tripod, it’s difficult or impossible to change the tape in a bottom (and many side) loading camcorders. Top loading recorders allow you to quickly swap out a tape in just a few seconds without loosing the image frame. Bottom loading recorders require you to unmount from the tripod, swap the tape, remount, and reframe the image.

Microphone Jack
Many low-end recorders omit a microphone jack, leaving you with only the built-in mic to capture audio. Unless you’re planning only to record scenes where the subject is within five feet of the camera, the built-in mic is probably useless. I strongly favor a camera with a mic jock so that I can connect a mic that fits the situation.

Earphone Jack
Similarly, many low-end recorders lack an earphone jack. Without this, you can’t tell whether the sound level is usable or there is unacceptable wind or background noise.

Macintosh Compatibility
I admit it: I use Macs. If you do, too, you’ll want to check carefully that any potential camcorder can be controlled from within iMovie and/or Final Cut Pro. This usually means you need a Firewire port on the camera (and will likely need to purchase a separate Firewire cable to connect to your computer).

Firewire
Many camcorders include USB and/or Firewire connections. USB, at least on a Macintosh, often allows you only to download still photos taken with the camera, not video. Again, check the compatibility of the camera with your operating system carefully.

Avoid Mini-DVD, if you use slot-loading drives
Most slot-loading DVD drives, such as those found on Macintosh notebooks, can’t handle the mini-dvd format. It’s simply a matter of the physical size of the disc.

Hopefully, these preferences will help you to choose a camera that fits your needs.

While talking with a friend recently about his writing, he confessed that he didn’t know any other way to write. He asked me to show him another way and I’ve decided to take him up on the challenge.

In thinking about his style, I realized that he was writing like a journalist; unfortunately he wasn’t a journalism student. When asked to write about a paper he read, he tended to give the who-what-where-when version of events:

Smith and his team at Harvard reported in their 1932 paper that pigs can indeed fly. Smith says that while watching airplanes taking off at the local aerodrome, they saw pigs flying overhead. He reports their shock at the sudden appearance. Johnson’s paper says they too found flying pigs in 1937.

In each sentence he wrote, the subject was the author or the author’s paper. I see this often in students’ writing and believe it happens because students are usually asked to read paper X by author Y and to write about it. That is, teachers make the mistake of asking students about the paper (“what did you think of the ‘Wombats eat Earth’ paper?”) or about the author (“what did you think of Smith?”), rather than about the ideas (“what is the common theme among this week’s readings and how is it reflected in each piece?”).

Strong academic writing more typically favors the statement of ideas, followed by evidence offered in support with attribution relegated to citations and footnotes:

Pigs were first observed flying near aerodromes almost 80 years ago (Smith, 1932). The buzzing of airplane turbines was later found to attract the flying animals (Johnson, 1937). Although no other sightings of flying pigs have been reported in respected academic journals, repeated analyses of photographs of those early observations have failed to find any evidence of tampering (Yu, 1975; Tau, 1983; Appleton, 1992).

The preferred general form, then, is: Claim -> Evidence -> Evidence -> Evidence -> Transition

Writing like a grad student means seeing beyond the obvious organization of topics (I read 3 papers, so I’ll write 3 summaries) to be able to see themes, relationships, weaknesses, and unexplored areas in the works.

(Note: All citations in this article are fictitious.)

One of the most time consuming tasks of writing is finding that perfect quotation, finding that page number where an important idea was introduced, etc. By recording what you believe to be valuable (citation-worthy) quotations in your Endnotes records, you can quickly search them and cite the page. I store quotes in the “Custom 7” field in this format:

This way, I have the quotation and the page number and can quickly insert critical information into my papers.

My rule: If it would be worth highlighting, it’s worth entering into Endnote. To set this up, first go to Endnote’s preferences and edit the reference type information:

Now, modify the displayed field names for the Custom 7 field and click Apply to All Ref Types to have this change applied to books, edited books, conference papers, etc.:

Now, when you view any record, you’ll have this additional field to use as you see fit.