A Guide to Effective Scientific Communication

Phrase Translation

It has long been known

I haven't bothered to look up the reference

It is believed

I think

It is generally believed

A couple of other guys think so too

It is not unreasonable to assume

If you believe this, you'll believe anything

Of great theoretical importance

I find it kind of interesting

Of great practical importance

I can get some mileage out of it

Typical results are shown

The best results are shown

3 samples were chosen for further study

The others didn't make sense, so we ignored them

The 4 hour sample was not studied

I dropped it on the floor

The 4 hour determination may not be significant

I dropped it on the floor, but scooped most of it up

The significance of these results is unclear

Look at the pretty artifact

It has not been possible to provide definitive answers

The experiment was negative, but at least I can publish the data somewhere

Correct within an order of magnitude

Wrong

It might be argued that

I have such a good answer for this objection that I shall now raise it

Much additional work will be required

This paper is not very good, but neither are all the others in this
miserable field

These investigations proved highly rewarding

My grant is going to be renewed

I thank X for assistance with the experiments and Y for useful
discussions on the interperetation of the data

X did the experiment and Y explained it to me