This article examines how research findings from the field of academic literacies might be used to underpin course design across the broad curriculum of higher education. During the last decade this research has unpacked the complex relationship between writing and learning, and pointed to gaps in students’ and tutors’ understanding of what is involved in writing for assessment. The article tak...

Good research paper writing can be made much simpler than most people think provided a few important principles are kept in mind. We cover these principles here, in just two pages, as we go through a description of the successive parts of a typical research paper. We hope this will help young researchers achieve in a short time the high standards expected at top international journals and confe...

Arnau de Vilanova, one of the most important physicians of the Latin Middle Ages, was familiar with the vast majority of Aristotle's works that had been translated into Latin. He used a wide range of them, such as the Organon--the introductory books on logic - and the natural philosophical books, which cover a different branches of knowledge. He used Aristotle as an authority, trying to reconci...

Adriane Fugh-Berman examines documents unsealed in recent litigation to investigate how pharmaceutical companies promoted hormone therapy drugs, including the use of medical writing companies to produce ghostwritten manuscripts and place them into medical journals.

Methods: First, we constructed a questionnaire based on the descriptors collected from various sources in order to elicit university teachers’ views on the importance of these descriptors. A revised version was produced based on the feedback from the initial questionnaire survey. In order to further investigate what level or levels these remaining descriptors would fall into, 35 university teac...

Hand dysfunction is commonly linked to ligamentous laxity (Murray 2006). The carpometacarpal joint (CMCJ) of the thumb may be particularly susceptible to weakened ligamentous constraints in the Ehlers-Danlos syndrome (Moore et al 1985). Symptoms may only present if the joint has been subject to excessive trauma, overuse or misuse and thus strains of the surrounding muscles and ligaments may hav...

One of the principles of Design by Contract is that contracts for software components must be written in a declarative way, using a formal, mathematically founded notation. When we apply the Design by Contract methodology in a naive and straightforward way, we risk ending up with unwanted duplication. In this paper, we describe a methodology for writing class contracts that avoids specification...

The importance of writing well can never be overstated for a successful professional career, and the ability to write solid papers is an essential trait of a productive researcher. Writing and publishing a paper has its own life cycle; properly following a course of action and avoiding missteps can be vital to the overall success not only of a paper but of the underlying research as well. Here,...