Choosing the right tense for your journal article or thesis

I always seem to have trouble remembering what tense should be used for what section of a thesis or journal article (makes for interesting proof-reading of student work!).  I sat down this weekend, as part of an academic writing workshop to finally pull some resources together that I can refer to in future.

So...

1.  The AJE has produced a short PDF detailing tense expectations for Scientific Manuscripts: http://www.aje.com/en/arc/dist/docs/AJE-Choosing-the-Right-Verb-Tense-for-Your-Scientific-Manuscript-2015.pdf   Its useful but quite detailed.

2.  This overview from Scitable was very helpful:

'In your scientific paper, use verb tenses (past, present, and future) exactly as you would in ordinary writing. Use the past tense to report what happened in the past: what you did, what someone reported, what happened in an experiment, and so on. Use the present tense to express general truths, such as conclusions (drawn by you or by others) and atemporal facts (including information about what the paper does or covers). Reserve the future tense for perspectives: what you will do in the coming months or years. Typically, most of your sentences will be in the past tense, some will be in the present tense, and very few, if any, will be in the future tense.'

Past tense 

Work done 
We collected blood samples from . . .
Groves et al. determined the growth rate of . . .
Consequently, astronomers decided to rename . . .

Work reported 
Jankowsky reported a similar growth rate . . .
In 2009, Chu published an alternative method to . . .
Irarrázaval observed the opposite behavior in . . .

Observations 
The mice in Group A developed, on average, twice as much . . .
The number of defects increased sharply . . .
The conversion rate was close to 95% . . .

Present tense 

General truths 
Microbes in the human gut have a profound influence on . . .
The Reynolds number provides a measure of . . .
Smoking increases the risk of coronary heart disease . . .

Atemporal facts 
This paper presents the results of . . .
Section 3.1 explains the difference between . . .
Behbood's 1969 paper provides a framework for . . .

Future tense 

Perspectives 
In a follow-up experiment, we will study the role of . . .
The influence of temperature will be the object of future research . . .

New Data, cities, & futures in the making: GED Seminar 8 September

GED Seminar Series

Thursday 8 September 2016, 4-5pm

VUW Kelburn, Cotton 304

All welcome

New Data, cities, & futures in the making

Speaker: Agnieszka Leszczynski, School of Environment, University of Auckland 

Abstract: In this talk, I take up ‘big data’ as a material-discursive project of future-ing (Anderson 2010) - of anticipating, shaping and circumscribing the horizon of possibiltites. Specifically, I focus on the ways in which urban big data – digital content about city spaces from city spaces – needs to be understood not only in terms of practices of automated management in ‘actually-existing’ smart cities (Shelton, Zook and Wiig 2015), but also as implicated in regimes of speculating about cities-to-come. As (big) data enrolled within modes of urban governance actualize particular visions of urban futures, I address the question of what kind of city is actually being enviosioned and affected.

As the city is subsumed as an object/subject of the data-security assemblage, rather than anticipating a radically different urban as would be consistent with an understanding of the future as something that is organically open, urban big data cannot divest itself of urban inequalities and the persistence of their geographies, projecting these forward in time and space. Extant inequalities are abstracted into data flows, informing and propagating through the calculation of algorithmically anticipated urban futures. Using empirical examples of the management of individual urban mobilities via neighbourhood safety apps and the securitization of city spaces through sentiment analytics, I demonstrate that the anticipation of unequal urban futures can be discerned at two scales of digital praxis: that of the body, and that of the city itself.

Biography:

Agnieszka Leszczynski is a Lecturer in GIScience at the University of Auckland. Her longstanding research interests are in GIScience & Society, with current attention towards how geolocation is valued in emergent market sectors such as the variously designated sharing, last-mile, platform and gig economies.