http://tc.eserver.org/authors/Hartley,_James A bibliography of works by Hartley, James in the field of technical communication. en-us Copyright (c) 2005-08 by the EServer. All rights reserved. tclib-editorial@eserver.org (TC Library Editorial Board) webmaster@eserver.org (Geoffrey Sauer) http://tc.eserver.org/images/newlogo.gif http://tc.eserver.org/dir/Hartley,_James http://tc.eserver.org/34990.html http://tc.eserver.org/34990.html Many authors give advice to students about how to write the Introduction section of their articles. Some give examples of different ways of doing this in general, and a few discuss the opening sentence in particular. In this article, 13 different types of opening sentences are outlined, and their usage contrasted in British and American journals in the Sciences and Social Sciences. Implications for teaching are considered. http://tc.eserver.org/32274.html http://tc.eserver.org/32274.html Authors of scientific articles in one language are often required to provide abstracts of their papers in a second language, and they use a variety of ways to achieve this. http://tc.eserver.org/29091.html http://tc.eserver.org/29091.html Many people have speculated over the last 80 years or so about the possibilities of using colored paper to boost response-rates to surveys and questionnaires, and several studies have been carried out. Most of these enquiries report no significant effects from using colored paper, although there have been some exceptions. In this investigation we pooled together the results from all of the experimental studies known to us on the topic and we carried out a meta-analysis to see if there might be a positive effect for colored paper overall. The results indicated that this was not the case, for we found no significant differences between the response rates to white and to colored paper in general. However, when we considered separately the most common colors used, it appeared that pink paper had the greatest effect. "One of the first considerations [to obtain a high response-rate] is the color of paper used in mail questionnaires. United States government officials who are responsible for the mailing of several million questionnaires every year have definitely determined that yellow paper gives the highest percentage of returns, with pink next in effectiveness, while all dark colors give much smaller returns" [1, p. 142]. http://tc.eserver.org/29020.html http://tc.eserver.org/29020.html Work with structured abstracts--which contain sub-headings in a standard order--has suggested that such abstracts contain more information, are of a higher quality, and are easier to search and to read than are traditional abstracts. The aim of this article is to suggest that this work with structured abstracts can be extended to cover scientific articles as a whole. The article outlines a set of sub-headings--drawn from research on academic writing--that can be used to make the presentation of scientific papers easier to read and to write. Twenty published research papers are then analyzed in terms of these sub-headings. The analysis, with some reservations, supports the viability of this approach. http://tc.eserver.org/29072.html http://tc.eserver.org/29072.html This article compares the response rates for obtaining journal reprints from colleagues when the requests are made using postcards with or without a self-addressed return label. Higher response rates were obtained from the cards with the self-addressed return labels, and more women responded than did men, but these differences were not statistically significant. http://tc.eserver.org/29151.html http://tc.eserver.org/29151.html There is little research on the use of titles in academic articles, and even less on different types of titles. In this article Crosby's taxonomy of titles [1] is brought up-to date and extended. Twelve types of titles are distinguished. The author argues that it would be helpful to discuss these different types with student writers. http://tc.eserver.org/29125.html http://tc.eserver.org/29125.html This article critiques some titles in journal articles for being misleading and it argues that titles need to be informative. Examples are given of work on measuring the effectiveness of titles in two areas--sentence structure and reader comprehension--and the article concludes with brief comments on the effectiveness of book titles. http://tc.eserver.org/29047.html http://tc.eserver.org/29047.html Structured abstracts contain more information, are of higher quality, and are easier to search and read than are traditional abstracts. However, there is a bewildering variety of ways in which structured abstracts can be printed and little is known about how the typography of structured abstracts can affect their clarity. The aim of this article is to delineate some of these major typographic variables and to comment on their effects upon the layouts of structured abstracts. http://tc.eserver.org/29099.html http://tc.eserver.org/29099.html Background: Previous research suggests that there are advantages to writing in groups or in pairs compared with writing individually, and that men write differently from women. However, as far as we know, no one has yet used new technology to assess published academic articles written in these different modes. Method: We assembled 80 papers from recent issues of the Journal of Educational Psychology as follows: 21 authored by individual men, 21 by individual women, 19 by pairs of men, and 19 by pairs of women. We then used two computer-based measures to assess various textual features of the Abstracts, the Introductions, and the Discussion sections of these 80 papers. Results: Several differences were found between these various parts of the journal articles (e.g., the Discussions were more readable than the Introductions and these in turn were more readable than the Abstracts). However, there were few differences between the writing of pairs or individuals, or between that of men and women. Conclusions: There was no real evidence to support the notion that writing in pairs would lead to better quality articles or that there would be differences between the readability of papers produced by men and women. Such differences may occur, however, before peer review.