In last week of Research Methods’course we had an outstanding lecture about presentation communication skills. Erkki presented us with a nice insight about the audience behind us (family, friends), sponsoring us and affected by our research.
It can really boost the research article to make right use of graphics, tables and other elements as discussed in that session. In addition, in my opinion what can make any research article really effective is the originality of content. And mainly, original for me as researcher. In the end of the day, thanks to many norms, paradigms and systematic process we’re losing a very important audience: the self.
My point is that the primary goal of any research should be the acquire of knowledge or at least the description of how we’re trying to achieve it. I get sometimes nostalgic when reading some papers nowadays and comparing to some reflections written by René Descartes, Plato or even Donald Knuth. Rather then following a formula, their articles contain more personal reflections and it is really easy to connect with the researcher and its cause.
My expectation is that after this course, both in my research papers and presentations I’ll rather prioritize to include my experiences, reflections and other personal views. As we said in the beginning, we have to be transparent about our motivation, methods, results and about everything.