My now-spouse, then-new-SO, proofread my thesis for grammar, clarity, etc. At the time, I had written my acknowledgments, but after the proofreading, I added a thanks to her to it at the end just before submitting it and finalizing it.
But, I was a bit careless, and my post-proofreading addition, designed to thank her for improving and checking my grammar, ... was a sentence fragment.
It might be a bit tasteless to be quoting ones own master's thesis, but I've always been a bit proud of my (embarrassingly long-winded and self-indulgent) acknowledgements.
It begins with
"First and foremost, I’d like to thank the nameless stranger that is responsible for enforcing the deadline for the submission of this thesis; but for their unwavering absolutism this thesis would exist in a perpetual state of being nearly done. The rest follows in no particular order"
And ends with
"Finally, this thesis is dedicated to the memory of the two laptops that gave up their magic smoke in the name of science and this thesis. To my Dell Studio 1555 and Asus Zenbook UXA1:
Do not go gentle into that goodnight
Rage, rage against the dying of the backlight"
"First and foremost, I’d like to thank the nameless stranger that is responsible for enforcing the deadline…
“I work best under pressure. In fact, I work only under pressure…”
Reminds me of what they say about composer Johann Sebastian Mastropiero:
« Whenever -due to economic necessity- Mastropiero was forced to compose music by request or commission, produced mediocre and inexpressive works. On the contrary, when he only obeyed his inspiration, he never wrote a note. »
wtf leslu on HN!
This made me think of part of RG Collingwood's Autobiography, when he spoke of growing up while many around him were artists of one kind or another.
"During the same years I was constantly watching the work of my father and mother, and the other professional painters who frequented their house, and constantly trying to imitate them ; so that I learned to think of a picture not as a finished product exposed for the admiration of virtuosi, but as the visible record, lying about the house, of an attempt to solve a definite problem in painting, so far as the attempt has gone.
I learned what some critics and aestheticians never know to the end of their lives, that no ‘work of art’ is ever finished, so that in that sense of the phrase there is no such thing as a ‘work of art’ at all. Work ceases upon the picture or manuscript, not because it is finished, but because sending-in day is at hand, or because the printer is clamorous for copy, or because ‘I am sick of working at this thing’ or ‘I can’t see what more I can do to it’."
sorry for out of topic: your surname reminded me of the great Polish poet, a Nobel laureate - Wisława Szymborska (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wis%C5%82awa_Szymborska)
I've been told we're related, but I don't know my polish family well so it might be apocrypha.
...and I want to add a great video involving her: https://www.ted.com/talks/rives_the_museum_of_four_in_the_mo...
Read it again in ten years and judge if you still find it witty. If you still do, I preemptively applaud your self confidence.
It's been 7 since I wrote it. I still appreciate it, if not on its own merits, for being an honest expression of who I was at the time and how its led to who I am now.
I think concerning oneself too much about how things will be perceived in the future like that is a good way to kill off most creative risks.
It might be a bit tasteless to be quoting ones own master's thesis
Eh, its something you poured a fairly significant portion of your life into?
You best brag about it whenever you get the chance :P
About two weeks I came across this tweet, from a PhD candidate just finishing up:
https://x.com/CharityWoodrum/status/1808313627864440930
"For Woody and Jayson Thomas. From the local universe to the first galaxies, the brightest moments in space and time occurred during our brief epoch together. That light is unquenchable."
She had gone back to school as an adult to study physics, she was just finishing up her undergrad when her husband and child were swept away by a wave while walking on the beach.
She kept on with school and is about to finish her Ph.D. I just can't comprehend how. https://www.tucsonweekly.com/tucson/ua-doctoral-candidate-in...
For those like myself wondering how a regular wave could do this, the article says it was something colloquially termed a "sneaker wave." Like a rogue wave, but on the shoreline. It also sounds like they all got hit by the wave, and only Charity survived.
Edit: National Weather article on Sneaker Waves: https://www.weather.gov/safety/sneaker-waves
Apparently the cold water and other complications make things worse.
Thank you, never heard of this. It sounds terrifying.
Sneaker waves appear suddenly on a coastline and without warning; generally, it is not obvious that they are larger than other waves until they break and suddenly surge up a beach. A sneaker wave can occur following a period of 10 to 20 minutes of gentle, lapping waves. Upon arriving, a sneaker wave can surge more than 150 feet (50 m) beyond the foam line, rushing up a beach with great force.
The force of a sneaker wave's surge and the large volume of water rushing far up a beach is enough to suddenly submerge people thigh- or waist-deep, knock them off their feet, and drag them into the ocean
The second one in this video [1].
My god, just 2 or 3 seconds later and the person filming this would've been swept away for good.
Very common on the west coast… I recommend having any kids playing on an ocean beach to wear a life jacket, and adults too unless they are, say, very experienced reading waves and swimming long distances in the ocean.
Someone is cutting onions
It's a terrible day for rain.
Not to take away from these legit ones, but it surprises me that some of the recent plagiarism cases included people who plagiarized their acknowledgements. Like really?
I mean, if they plagiarized the paper it's only right to thank the people who helped the original version, no?
You are correct.
My housemate during our honours year had large portions of his thesis plagarised by the student who took over his work afterwards. We were surprised to discover that of all the lifted sections it was the acknowledgements that had the highest proportion of copying! I found this doubly funny because, compared to the adroit technical writing in the rest of the thesis, my friend's acknowledgement seemed florid and overwritten to me. It's a truly fascinating phenomenon.
I always looked forward to the acknowledgements at the end of thesis defenses, in biology at MIT and Harvard. Different fields have very different defense cultures. Most have brief acknowledgements. Biology... had an art form. The audience is friends and family. Associated labs turn out in support. The format is tiled photo slides. I've seen thanks to inspiring teachers, by name, from kindergarten to graduate. Pets, childhood and current. A stuffed animal. SO's and spouses. Children existing and pending. Family immediate and extended, alive and missed. Lab mates, friends, colleagues. And their assorted group adventures, road trips, and hijinks. Hobbies and communities. Staff, collaborators, advisors, committee. Brief tales of trials and tribulations, in research and in life.
The stories of group fun strike me as the biggest delta vis TFA. And stories in general. Plus the tears. And the interesting slips - "... to thank my husband, <name of professor not husband, oops>".
The defenses were recorded, but distribution was usually limited. I've thought they might be great things to somehow share with younger students, contemplating college or graduate school. Being able to see people like themselves, coming out the other end. Having had a blast with friends along the way. There's a tension between intimacy and broadcast. Perhaps someday we can start scavenging older ones?
I so miss surfing defences and research talks. :/
My favorite paragraph I ever wrote was my acknowledgement intro:
I thought when I finished this dissertation I would feel great. As in large or
capable significantly above the average amount. Completing a project like this
over five years is not something I can attribute to my own abilities. Any
milestone is the sum of the individual decisions that led to it and when I
look at the amount of guidance, encouragement, patience, and downright goading
that it took to make the decisions that led to this point, I feel only gratitude.
Greatness is measured in qaulity, not qauntity
Luckily I had neither - so I had humility by force.
The scheme shell acknowledgements really break up the monotony
Even if meant as satire, I find these disturbing.
There's also the funding acknowledgement in the YOLO v3 tech report (https://pjreddie.com/media/files/papers/YOLOv3.pdf):
But maybe a better question is: “What are we going to do with these detectors now that we have them?” A lot of the people doing this research are at Google and Facebook. I guess at least we know the technology is in good hands and definitely won’t be used to harvest your personal information and sell it to.... wait, you’re saying that’s exactly what it will be used for?? Oh.
Well the other people heavily funding vision research are the military and they’ve never done anything horrible like killing lots of people with new technology oh wait....[1]
[1] The author is funded by the Office of Naval Research and Google.
The design is nicely done, too. I expected something very academic, this was interactive.
I'd imagine there was a way to do this without completely hijacking scrolling between cards, though. Perhaps it was just loading additional content slowly due to HN traffic, but with the majority being text it should probably all be loaded up front anyway.
I think it broke on my phone, perhaps as it lost interest, but that made the site a nice 1.0 experience.
This is very cute :)
Definitely one of my favorite parts to read of any thesis are the acknowledgements. It’s often a time to lower the “fancy academic” mask and really see the human behind the writing; something essentially impossible with the dressed-up writing of many disciplines!
I believe the first part of my own acknowledgements began with: “There are only a few interesting things in this thesis. Out of all of them, this section might be the most important.”
To this day, this is still true!
But there wouldn’t be the “human” without the mask…perhaps even humanity is a mask
Sure, it’s all a mask, but there’s something more “real” behind the acknowledgements in a very distinct way than the editorialized writing of an scientific article. (Using quotes here as these things are deliberately fuzzy!)
One of my favourite acknowledgements in a book is from "Proofs: A long-form mathematics textbook" by Jay Cummings[1]. Which as it sounds like is a maths textbook. Anyhow the acknowledgement reads:
"To my loving wife,
who read this entire book,
apart from the math parts."
These are surprisingly beautiful, poetic. They reflect what I think would be the best of the humanity that we have, anywhere and everywhere. I thank the collector of these for some brief moments in the music of others' lives.
My PhD acknowledgements I found to be stressful. So much expectations for a few words, so many different ways of writing these. And how to know what tone was the right one for this occasion, in a university of a country still not my own, with a field not directly defined and thus not a clear influence even from there? Worse, the flowery style common in many of the thesis I saw just did not feel right, I wouldn't write like that ever.
I was very happy when I found a PhD thesis which made it different. It wrote, in french:
Acknowledgements
[the list of people]
find here my most severe gratitude.
That felt clear, honest and fitting. I copied that one.
Maybe that was one of the older styles mentioned in the articles.
The "Scientists react to their PhD acknowledgements" video[1] at the bottom is brief (6 m) and sweet.
[1] https://science.anu.edu.au/news-events/videos/scientists-rea...
At my faculty, we always "joked" that the acknowledgements were the most read section of any thesis. First thing everyone did when they got handed a new thesis was looking to see who was mentioned in the acknowledgements.
(we joked about it, but there's a grain of truth to it. the chapters themselves were usually published long ago already and only people in your specific field would care about them anyways).
Strewth! This was brilliant. Thanks.
“And thank you for picking up the slack with house chores whenever I was bogged down with lab work – I know I was the reason you bought that Roomba. Lauren Harrison
Sex and conflict: How competition shapes reproduction, behaviour and life-histories in various animals (2022)”
Pretty funny juxtaposition of thesis title and acknowledgment.
On my master's thesis, I ended up using a line that I wrote when preparing the template at the beginning of my 'journey': "I thank everyone who contributed to making this work possible." By the end of the master's program, I didn't feel the need to update it, as it remained true to me. I felt that if someone was going to read that section, they would immediately identify themselves there, and I didn't have to name them.
I also often find myself reading the acknowledgments whenever I read a thesis (though I try to save it for the end as a reward for myself).
If anyone is interested. At Harvard, most Ph.D programs submit to DASH, meaning that you should be able to read any non-embargoed thesis from the past 10 or so years at https://dash.harvard.edu/handle/1/4927603/browse?type=dateis...
It's not a thesis, but one of my favorite acknowledgements is from Bob Atkey's paper on quantitative type theory (which assigns quantities of 0, 1, or ω to types):
This work is dedicated to Orwell the dog. Orwell was a good dog and knew well the difference between zero, one, and many.
Still top of the list for me is Olin Shivers' 1994 acknowledgements to his scsh project:
Who should I thank? My so-called ``colleagues,'' who laugh at me behind my back, all the while becoming famous on my work? My worthless graduate students, whose computer skills appear to be limited to downloading bitmaps off of netnews? My parents, who are still waiting for me to quit ``fooling around with computers,'' go to med school, and become a radiologist? My department chairman, a manager who gives one new insight into and sympathy for disgruntled postal workers?
My God, no one could blame me -- no one! -- if I went off the edge and just lost it completely one day. I couldn't get through the day as it is without the Prozac and Jack Daniels I keep on the shelf, behind my Tops-20 JSYS manuals. I start getting the shakes real bad around 10am, right before my advisor meetings. A 10 oz. Jack 'n Zac helps me get through the meetings without one of my students winding up with his severed head in a bowling-ball bag. They look at me funny; they think I twitch a lot. I'm not twitching. I'm controlling my impulse to snag my 9mm Sig-Sauer out from my day-pack and make a few strong points about the quality of undergraduate education in Amerika.
If I thought anyone cared, if I thought anyone would even be reading this, I'd probably make an effort to keep up appearances until the last possible moment. But no one does, and no one will. So I can pretty much say exactly what I think.
Oh, yes, the acknowledgements. I think not. I did it. I did it all, by myself.
Acknowledgements have a quality which is hard to describe.
They feel like they’ve been drafted a hundred times in the head of the author, but then put down on the page in a hurry, the clock ticking on their deadline.
Like, they’re trying to tell you the most important thing they’ve ever said - at the very moment the ship is pulling away from the dock.
A lovely read. I also have an affinity for dissertation acknowledgements and I think this entire piece really captures why they feel so special :)
I was at first surprised that people thank God in the acknowledgements. Then remembered what PhD students go through.
They feel like they’ve been drafted a hundred times in the head of the author, but then put down on the page in a hurry, the clock ticking on their deadline.
This is so spot on it hurts. The acknowledgements in my own thesis were drafted and re-drafted over and over in my head for months, and then written down the day before submission.
When I was trying to choose a PhD supervisor one of the things I did was read through recent grads' acknowledgments. While no one ever mentioned their advisor with anything but gracious words, you could get a pretty good idea of what working with that faculty member was like.
For some reason, that made me weepy.
My favorite PhD dedication:
”To my surprise”
Would you mind sharing that fragment?
I'm a 53 year old en_GB speaker and writer and long term owner of a copy of "Usage and abusage: A Guide to Good English" and long ago decided to boot the bloody thing into the long grass.
You and I (and every other interaction involving English) decide how English is spoken or written. At least Partridge uses the term "guide" for his treatise. There is no such thing as a pure English, finely polished and honed to a razor edge and delivered with equanimity. I think the best we can all hope for is to be mutually understood.
Given all that, I don't think I've ever heard of a "sentence fragment". It sounds like a grammar sin, probably funded by the lower circles of hell. I attended several very posh schools in the UK as well as the standard education system hereabouts and I don't recall that term being used. Perhaps I was asleep at the time.
I've done a quick search and this is dreadfully fluffy: https://www.grammarly.com/blog/mistake-of-the-month-sentence...
I'd love to hear what "sentence fragment" really means: to whom and why.
English sentences need a subject and a verb. Often a sentence fragment missing a verb (like this).
What nonsense!
That is probably the better example of a perfectly good sentence fragment. There are many others in spoken English.
I'm inclined to agree with your sentiment, but the example given doesn't quite sit right with me.
"Often a sentence fragment missing a verb (like this)."
vs
"Often a sentence fragment is missing a verb (like this)."
We still have short sentences which seem to make sense without a verb. Is the following grammatically incorrect? "Hello there!"
"Spoken English" being the key phrase there; if you use spoken English in a formal document or letter, it may reflect poorly on you.
Comment sections on the internets - and acknowledgements - are a bit milder on those grammar rules I'm sure.
This sentence no verb.
That’s only intellible if I think you’re a native speaker of a pro-drop language where the copulative is dropped. Because of the structure of the English, it is ambiguous what “missing” here is appositional to, since participial forms in pro-drop languages are usually conjugated according to their case, number, and gender (at least among the Indo-European languages), so I can’t tell if the fragment is missing a sentence or if the verb is missing a fragment (or other, numerous possible interpretations).
Its not a bad thing to be wrong, since, when it comes to expression, one can never be right. But it is still better to know the best way to be wrong, a wrong way that cannot be made right. And then you yourself will have created something entirely new.
Sure -- the other comments have done a good job of explaining my usage of "sentence fragment" (which was what we referred to it as in my composition classes in high school, although I now see this may have been more colloquial than I realized) but the fragment in question was of the form:
"A special thanks to [name] for [carefully proofreading]."
What really got me is that I probably even thought I had written "goes to" or something, since that (with the verb) is the type of construction I often use!
As a non-native speaker, I have no idea what's wrong with the sentence (fragment?) you wrote.
When removing extraneous modifiers, it takes the form of "[article] [subject]" -- "A thanks."
Similar constructions would be "A cucumber." "The house."
It's a fragment, not a complete sentence, because it lacks a predicate. Had GP included the word "goes" as discussed, it would've created a predicate.
[0] https://www.grammarly.com/blog/predicate/
Possibly you may have come across it under the term an 'incomplete sentence' - as others have stated, it's a set of words which don't form a complete thought.
I'm also a en_gb speaker, and I'd never heard of the term until my teen years using the Microsoft Word grammar checker.
It's always the late additions that get you. Our wedding favor to our guests was a cookbook of recipes we collected with the RSVPs[0]. About the last thing I added was an About the Recipes page which included the following paragraph:
We have edited recipes for length and for typographic consistency, but we've done a bad job of it. This is in part because we did much of the editing with a drink in one hand; if we hadn't it never would have gotten done. We hope that we've successfully retained the color and character you put into the recipe while making the finished cookbook look at least somewhat consistent rhoughout.
[0] I cannot begin to describe how much work this was. If you're reading this and thinking "how lovely", you've been warned.
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes ?
That is delicious.
I'm absolutely certain that she loved it. I would've. That's too funny not to.