GENERAL COMMENTS ABOUT PROJECT PROPOSALS:

A couple of comments pertaining to all proposals:

(i) All the references in your reference list must be cited within the text, otherwise there is no way to evaluate the relevance of the references to your research.

(ii) You must explain what is already known about the question you’re addressing. Even if nothing is known about the specific contrast you’re investigating, you must explain what is already known about closely related areas.

The next time you need to turn in your project proposal is on April 11^th, with your final stimulus materials (see web-site). At that time the document should look like a(n unfinished) paper, not a proposal. It should be written in scientific style. There’s lots of guides to scientific writing on the web, but below you’ll find some of the most important “rules”. Your April 11^th version of the project should already conform to these. These guidelines are not specific to neurolinguistics, they apply to all scientific writing. (Theoretical linguistics papers do not yet follow scientific writing style, strictly speaking, but they are becoming more and more scientific, and learning to write in this style can only improve your linguistics papers.)

1. It is absolutely vital that your paper starts out with a statement of the general question your research addresses and an explanation of why this is a fascinating problem in the study of language (and, hopefully, human cognition in general). If your problem isn’t fascinating, why should you bother studying it and why should anyone bother to read your paper? Make your general question as general as possible. Then narrow down to the more specific question you’re addressing and explain its relevance for the general question.

Good intro: “To what extent does perception depend on attention? This issue has been a central question in attention theory over the past 40 years, yet it remains unresolved. Two contrasting positions have emerged. Some

studies have suggested the importance of attention for perception, showing that unattended stimuli apparently receive very little processing (1). Other studies, however, have implied that unattended stimuli can be perceived and have some effect on behavior as measured by indirect methods (for example, reaction times and evoked potentials) (2). Here, we combine functional imaging and psychophysics to test a theory that resolves the long-standing controversy between these two established positions.”

Bad intro: “In this study we first asked people to perform linguistic tasks of low or high load while ignoring irrelevant visual motion in the periphery of the display. In a second experiment each trial was followed by visual motion artefact. Our aim was to better understand how attention works.

(Huh? Why are the authors interested in this specific task? How exactly would this help us understand attention??)

2. The paper should be written in an objective style. The first person singular is never used (unless you’re a Nobel laureate reviewing your ground-breaking discoveries!). The first person plural can be used, if there are several authors. If there is a single author, the passive is always used. You never report your own opinions, your opinions don’t matter. What matters is: (i) what are the possible ways in which the world works (the hypothesis space) and (ii) how the evidence available (either collected by you or someone else) bears on these possibilities, i.e. what is likely to be true. I.e. you can only report your own opinions by expressing them as part of the hypothesis space and then backing them up with evidence.

3. You cannot make factual statements without either providing a reference for them, or proving evidence for them yourself. I.e. you cannot make a statement like: “Honey bees’ foraging habits are heavily debated” without citation to the studies that have looked at honey bees’ foraging habits. Also, you cannot say “linguistic object A involves the structure X” without citing studies that have argued for X, or without providing evidence for X yourself.

4. You should write in the past tense, scientific papers report research that has happened in the past.

5. Conciseness and clarity are most important aspects of scientific writing. Here’s some useful advice (from: http://www.humboldt.edu/~mac24/sci_wri/pg1.html):

A scientific paper attempts to tell others about some specific data you have collected and how you interpret those data. Papers should be direct; brevity is a natural consequence of a direct presentation style that avoids unnecessary wordiness. Scientific papers are somewhat journalistic in this respect. Although generally brief, good scientific papers explain each important point clearly and fully, using complete sentences. Diligent attention to grammar and style is crucial to the success of such a spare, direct approach. Every sentence must have a purpose; every word must be chosen with care and must be genuinely necessary for effective communication. Scientific manuscripts contain no rambling, descriptive passages in which to hide sloppy thinking or poorly conceived ideas. Metaphor, analogy, hyperbole, and other literary devices are rarely used in scientific writing. Their absence is nearly absolute in reportive papers, such as those you will write in the general biology laboratory. Remember, your purpose in writing a scientific paper is to present information clearly and unambiguously; literary devices such as these often operate obliquely and are thus inappropriate in a direct presentation. Although good scientific writing eschews colorful language and unnecessary embellishment, it is not impoverished or dull; rather, it achieves a formal elegance through its lean efficiency.