{"id":396,"date":"2008-05-15T16:56:16","date_gmt":"2008-05-15T20:56:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/michaelnielsen.org\/blog\/?p=396"},"modified":"2008-07-28T16:34:02","modified_gmt":"2008-07-28T20:34:02","slug":"request-for-comments-on-the-future-of-science","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/michaelnielsen.org\/blog\/request-for-comments-on-the-future-of-science\/","title":{"rendered":"Request for comments on &#8220;The Future of Science&#8221;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><b>Update:<\/b> Thankyou to everyone who has replied.  I&#8217;m no longer looking for test readers.<\/p>\n<p>I completed a first draft of my book &#8220;The Future of Science&#8221; last year.  I was happy with much of it, but the draft was inadequate in important ways.  I put it aside to let the ideas gestate.  I took it up again a couple of months back and have since been hard at work on a second draft.  This time around I&#8217;m much happier, and I&#8217;m now looking for a few people willing to comment on the second draft of chapter 1.<\/p>\n<p>The book is aimed at a wide audience, and so I&#8217;m interested in feedback from a wide cross-section of people.  I already know many people in the hard sciences, but there&#8217;s many other groups I&#8217;d also like to reach.  For that reason I&#8217;m particularly interested in getting feedback from programmers, entrepeneurs, biologists, social scientists, students (both undergrad and grad), and from non-scientists.<\/p>\n<p>If you&#8217;re in one or more of these groups, and interested in reading and providing comments, please let me know (mnielsen at perimeterinstitute dot ca).  Of course, if you&#8217;re in the hard sciences and keen to read, I&#8217;d also like to hear from you!  Unfortunately, this is not a paying gig, unless you count my thanks in the acknowledgements.<\/p>\n<p>A few bits and pieces about what sorts of commentary would be especially helpful:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Which are the boring parts?  Elmore Leonard has said the secret of good writing is to leave out the boring parts.  Unfortunately, I find it hard to spot the boring parts in my own work, so comments from sympathetic and perceptive readers help.  One trick I find useful is to score all my sentences or paragraphs: 1 = boring, 2 = okay, 3 = interesting.  Eliminating, compressing or changing the 1&#8217;s and 2&#8217;s inevitably strengthens the piece.\n<li>Where is the book unclear?  Where do I write like a specialist &#8211; a physicist, a geek, or an academic?\n<li>What important ideas are missing?  Is anything flat-out wrong?  What&#8217;s unconvincing?\n<li>How can I improve the impact of the writing? Simple comments &#8211; &#8220;this paragraph is flat&#8221;, &#8220;you could use a more active verb here&#8221; &#8211; can be incredibly helpful.\n<\/ul>\n<p>(You might ask why I don&#8217;t just blog the drafts.  Certainly, this is becoming pretty common, and it&#8217;s something I&#8217;m keen to do. However, I&#8217;m yet to sign a contract with a publisher, and I&#8217;d like to get my future publisher&#8217;s endorsement before blogging huge swathes of the book.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Update: Thankyou to everyone who has replied. I&#8217;m no longer looking for test readers. I completed a first draft of my book &#8220;The Future of Science&#8221; last year. I was happy with much of it, but the draft was inadequate in important ways. I put it aside to let the ideas gestate. I took it&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/michaelnielsen.org\/blog\/request-for-comments-on-the-future-of-science\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Request for comments on &#8220;The Future of Science&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-396","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelnielsen.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/396","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelnielsen.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelnielsen.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelnielsen.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelnielsen.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=396"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/michaelnielsen.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/396\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelnielsen.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=396"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelnielsen.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=396"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelnielsen.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=396"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}