Mauricio Monsalve Moreno’s Weblog

2011 has almost ended. This is the year I started to do research seriously. I will keep doing that, but I will focus more on writing papers. I have noticed that researching something is really fun and one learns a lot of things in the way, but without a short term research goal (to get an important intermediate publishable result), one could work and work until getting something big, but nothing publishable during the way. And that is not healthy. So, I decided to organize my research projects as composed of intermediate milestones which consist in publishable results. That slightly reduces the flexibility of one’s research path to get to a result, but it pays off. Now, before I start working on something, I will write a potential timeline with research questions and choose the direction that leads to the better paper, without deviating too much from the final (normally decided by a funding agency) research goal.

I also learned how to organize narratives to be more convincing through clarity. This is crucial to the researcher, because using inadequate narrative structures can weaken the relevance or convincingness of a paper. The general key to clarity is to remember that your argumental structure is not about ideas but guidance. A structure based on ideas would say that paragraphs are organized like [intro], [idea1], [idea2], …, [end]. A structure based on guidance would say that paragraphs are organized like [what+importance], [top level explanation of the text], [go to idea1, work on simpler case], [give example], [show limits of simplification], [idea1], &c. Each part of one’s narrative must have a communication goal; to communicate an idea is just one part of this. Of course, communication goals aren’t to be chosen freely. One must remember that one should try to focus on one thing at a time, to make the life of the receptors easier. This is the way of simplification: work on simpler and simpler objects, until one gets to the details… but there are many strategies for this. But also, one must provide control too: one must prevent receptors get distracted by using too much detail at a time. For example, a landscape may consist of a day sky, a forest and a mountain chain at the background. Then, one describes the clouds and birds in the sky, and the colors; the forest becomes a bunch of trees of different shapes; and the mountain chain becomes a set of peaks with snow, hills, inclinations, &c. But one’s work is to also provide guidance, so when one describes the landscape, one could start with the forest, talk about how it ends at the base of the mountains, talk about the mountains, then talk about how their peaks reach the sky, talk about the sky, and why not, finish by talking about the greatness of the sky and recall how the narrative journey started… I could truly elaborate on this, but I am happy to say that I learned that it was all about guidance! And that is the objective of communication, not ideas! A person talks to others to induce something on them. That is the natural basis of communication. But as coordination increases, people’s minds get synchronized and all seems to be about ideas, which is a false appreciation of the broader picture.