Writing

By coincidence, I have had several discussions about footnotes, endnotes, and different types of citation styles recently. Such discussions often end up in “religious” wars, in which researchers from different disciplines argue why “their” system is the best. I often find myself agreeing with none or everyone in such discussions since I work in and between several disciplines (the arts, humanities, technology, psychology, medicine) and publish my work in journals that use different ways of handling citations and notes....

I have been working on an ERC Starting Grant application over the last months. Besides the usual conceptual/practical challenges of writing funding applications, this particular application also posed the challenge of writing not only one proposal document, but two: one long (15 pages) and one short (5 pages). I am used to writing research papers and applications where you are dealing with three levels: title abstract content But for the ERC application I had to handle four levels:...

I just discovered that it is common to use a comma before and after i.e. and e.g. in American English style of writing. In British English, a comma is inserted before but not after these abbreviations.

I have been using LaTeX for most of my more advanced writing needs for so many years, that I tend to forget that there are so few other good options out there for writing what could be called “complex” documents, i.e. book-sized documents with a good portion of notes, pictures, links, etc. I just had to help out in trying to create a large document based on 30+ individual documents in MS Word....