Peer review of your writing

In class today I facilitated a peer review session where you were paired each others work. Thank you to all of you who took part, I hope it was helpful.

You can find a recording of the session here.

Some generic things that I addressed were:

• Q: “Should I use ‘I’ or ‘we’ when writing?”

• A: I don’t personally feel strongly about this. Be consistent (don’t swap from 1 to the other). Some people do have strong opinions about this so I usually avoid the problem and just use the third person: “This paper will…”, “That section shows…”.

• Q: “There are marks for originality, how can I know if the work is original?”

• A: This is a great question. The simple answer: you tell me. You demonstrate that you have read a lot of the related literature to understand the gap your work occupies (or perhaps that you work is not original). This isn’t about me the marker being lazy but more about you demonstrating of the wider context in which your work sits.

• Q: “Should we include captions in our work?”

• A: Yes and you can use them to really highlight the specific thing of interest you are captioning.

• Q: “How much description of how you carried something out should be included?”
• A: You do not need to include a code snippet using a small call to the Nashpy library BUT if you did something specific that you want credit for, be this solving an equation, gathering some data, writing some bespoke code or whatever else it is then you should include those details in your paper.