Interlude: Jokes, Quality, and Tracking Accomplishments

As a word nerd, I love a good writing joke. And I recently discovered a list of writing jokes that are too good not to share. I hope they add a little fun to your day.

• An Oxford comma walks into a bar, where it spends the evening watching the television, getting drunk, and smoking cigars.

• A dangling participle walks into a bar. Enjoying a cocktail and chatting with the bartender, the evening passes pleasantly.

• A bar was walked into by the passive voice.

• An oxymoron walked into a bar, and the silence was deafening.

• Two quotation marks walk into a “bar.”

• A malapropism walks into a bar, looking for all intensive purposes like a wolf in cheap clothing, muttering epitaphs and casting dispersions on his magnificent other, who takes him for granite.

• Hyperbole totally rips into this insane bar and absolutely destroys everything.

• A question mark walks into a bar?

• A non sequitur walks into a bar. In a strong wind, even turkeys can fly.

• Papyrus and Comic Sans walk into a bar. The bartender says, “Get out—we don't serve your type.”

• A mixed metaphor walks into a bar, seeing the handwriting on the wall but hoping to nip it in the bud.

• A comma splice walks into a bar, it has a drink and then leaves.

• Three intransitive verbs walk into a bar. They sit. They converse. They depart.

• A synonym strolls into a tavern.

• At the end of the day, a cliché walks into a bar—fresh as a daisy, cute as a button, and sharp as a tack.

• A run-on sentence walks into a bar it starts flirting. With a cute little sentence fragment.

• Falling slowly, softly falling, the chiasmus collapses to the bar floor.

• A figure of speech literally walks into a bar and ends up getting figuratively hammered.

• An allusion walks into a bar, despite the fact that alcohol is its Achilles heel.

• The subjunctive would have walked into a bar, had it only known.

• A misplaced modifier walks into a bar owned by a man with a glass eye named Ralph.

• The past, present, and future walked into a bar. It was tense.

• A dyslexic walks into a bra.

• A verb walks into a bar, sees a beautiful noun, and suggests they conjugate. The noun declines.

• A simile walks into a bar, as parched as a desert.

• A gerund and an infinitive walk into a bar, drinking to forget.

• A hyphenated word and a non-hyphenated word walk into a bar and the bartender nearly chokes on the irony.

Now onto this week's round-up...

💌 Round-up

👓 Reading

​Reporting quality of abstracts and inconsistencies with full text articles in pediatric orthopedic publications​
"...we found low reporting quality of abstracts and noticeable inconsistencies with full-text articles, especially regarding inclusion or exclusion criteria and study correlations....we recommend that authors, reviewers, and editors ensure abstracts are reported accurately, ideally following the appropriate reporting guidelines, and that they double check that there are no inconsistencies between abstracts and full text articles."

​Strategies for communicating scientific evidence on healthcare to managers and the population: a scoping review​
"Among the strategies evaluated and appearing to yield some benefit are (i) risk/benefit communication: natural frequencies instead of percentages, absolute risk instead relative risk and number needed to treat, numerical instead nominal communication, mortality instead survival; negative or loss content appear to be more effective than positive or gain content; (ii) evidence synthesis: plain languages summaries to communicate the results of Cochrane reviews to the community were perceived as more reliable, easier to find and understand, and better to support decisions than the original summaries; (iii) teaching/learning: the Informed Health Choices resources seem to be effective for improving critical thinking skills."

🧰 Tools

​Flight Tracker​
I got the scoop on this software while I was at Vanderbilt University Medical Center last week and highly recommend checking it out. "Flight Tracker for Scholars...tracks the academic career development of biomedical scholars – whether on a training (T) grant, an early career (K) grant, or some other population of scholars. It provides up-to-date and accurate statistics on your scholars’ publishing, grant awards, resource use, and more."

❓ Question

How do you keep track of your accomplishments and career development? Can you create a system to make the tracking easier?
 

Thank you so much for reading.

Warmly,

Crystal