Second letter in Science!

I have yet another story of a publication that started because I was wasting time on the Internet. I say again: blogging is one of the best ways for an academic to work out ideas.

This new publication is my second brush with the realm of glamour magazines in my career. It’s a letter again and not a research article, but I’ll take it.

Blog readers and maybe some of my Twitter followers might recognize the arguments. They are the same ones I made in this blog post previously. Somewhere along the way, I found myself referencing it in tweets that I thought, “Maybe I can bring this to a wider audience.” More people read the glamour magazines than my blog. I chose to try for Science because it seemed to me that GRE discussions were most relevant to the US.

While the letter is short, it actually expanded from what I originally submitted. Letters editor Jennifer Sills pushed me to expand the last paragraph to include a few sentences about possible solutions. This was a good push, and the letter is better because of it.  I’ll quote Clay Shirky again (emphasis added):

(W)hat are the parent professions needed around writing? Publishing isn’t one of them. Editing, we need, desperately.

While blogging is one of the best ways I have found to develop and work through academic ideas, an editor who genuinely edits is invaluable in fine tuning and honing ideas.

References

Faulkes Z. 2019. #GRExit's unintended consequences. Science 363(6425): 356. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aaw1012

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Letter in Science!
I come to bury the GRE, not to praise it

Publishing may be a button, but publishing isn’t all we need