On Friday, November 15th, 2024, the seminar series hosted a talk by Prof. John Haslett, Fellow Emeritus Statistics, Trinity College Dublin, titled “Thoughts on Academic Writing”. Details for the talk are below.
Title
Thoughts on Academic Writing
Abstract
The topic of this seminar, cross-disciplinary Academic Writing, is provoked by several years of work, post-retirement as TCD Prof of Statistics, with TCD’s Student Learning Development unit. There we encounter students of many disciplines, from first year Nursing to PhD in Art History. In this seminar I will reflect on several aspects of the teaching and learning this vital academic skill, and provide links to sites that I have found to be valuable when talking to students. In general, it seems fair to say that the teaching of this skill in Ireland leaves much to be desired, as also seems to be the case in most other countries. In particular, my own career tells me that the learning of this skill is almost completely unaddressed in the STEM areas. The age of LLM based generative artificial intelligence provides new urgency to such thinking. I hope to provoke discussion on several aspects of this topic, both practical and conceptual. One recent example of a thought provoking article is a book review in the Economist, a high-browish magazine, of David Spiegelhalter’s latest book “The Art of Uncertainty”, a topic of some interest to Statisticians. The critic opens provocatively: “A hazard of teaching mathematics rather than, say, history is that the homework is a lot harder to come up with. After all, “Was Henry VIII a good king?” is a reasonable question to ask either a classroom of nine-year-olds or a lecture theatre of postgraduates. But “Solve this quadratic equation” would leave the classroom nonplussed and the lecture theatre unimpressed.” I will challenge the seminar to reflect constructively on this, and other examples, by outlining how one might write a short piece in response. Suffice to say that there is no right answer!
Slides for the talk can be found here.