Discussing research – day 2: language for arguing your case
Free PreviewIntroduction
When presenting a poster or other research at a conference you will need language to put forward your opinions. This may not be that dissimilar to language that you would use in your research paper, however, spoken language may be more informal compared with the formal style of written research.
The phrases that appear below can be used to present your points of view or you may need them to answer questions that are put to you asking about your viewpoint. Or they could be used if you get people speaking to you who are questioning your assumptions.
Phrases for arguing your case
My own view is that…
In our view…
The reason for this is that…
Arguably, it would have been better…
From one point of view…
From one perspective, it would have been…
The main issue here is that…
Our contention is that…
This point is particularly relevant to…
There are two points that are worth considering, firstly….
In view of this…
It is no exaggeration to state that…
It is self-evident that…
What is certain is that…
There is compelling evidence that…
We are convinced that…
The justification for this assumption is…
It is widely accepted that…
We can assume that…
It is worth noting that…
This is supported by the fact that…
This raised the question whether…
Arguing against
This does not imply…
One question is whether…
It is not clear that…
These are discouraging results…
It is important to consider that…
One difficulty with this answer is…
A potential problem is that…
A major weakness is…
However, there is also evidence to suggest…
One major limitation is…
From a different standpoint…
From a different viewpoint…
A more likely explanation is…
A more likely interpretation is…
The extract below is from a comment published in the a journal and it uses a style of persuasion that may be useful in research discussion.
On the reliability of power measurements in the terahertz band
One issue that is often discussed at conferences and during peer review of terahertz research is the ability to make reliable and traceable power measurements that would allow comparison between a variety of experiments in laboratories around the world. In many cases, power levels are quoted either in arbitrary units, or in actual physical units obtained from equipment that in many cases have not been calibrated properly. The reason for this is that using broadly accepted measurement methods implies the use of well calibrated instruments, which are not generally available, and requires relatively strict experimental designs and a systematic measurement uncertainty analysis taking into account all statistical and systematic error contributions which, in turn, results in reports of the performance of devices such as emitters and detectors, that cannot be fairly compared.
Outlook
Over the last 5 years, important efforts have fructified in the introduction of new absorbers, which in turn have allowed improving the accuracy of traceable power measurements across the band between 0.7 and 5 THz in free-space. In addition, the reliability of waveguided power measurement methods for radiation in the mm-wave band has improved by the use of microcalorimetry.
We foresee that with the introduction of these novel techniques and devices, in addition to the ability to calibrate existing radiometric devices, the power measurements in this spectral region will become much more consistent in the coming few years. This will eliminate the inconsistencies that still come up in the literature.
This extract is taken from: Castro-Camus, E., Koch, M., Kleine-Ostmann, T. et al. On the reliability of power measurements in the terahertz band. Commun Phys 5, 42 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s42005-022-00817-2
There is no multiple-choice quiz with today’s article.