Demo Edit 7 (Optional)

In this next module, I’m going to walk you through how I would edit a whole essay. This is an essay from a student from a previous course. Now I want you to pause the video, read through the essay a couple of times. It’s also provided as a text file if you’d rather read it there. If you have time, try editing it on your own. And then restart the video and I’ll walk you through it. So this is the introduction section of a scientific manuscript about a new treatment for ovarian cancer. The essay has several strengths. It has some nice language in it. It has a nice logical flow, the right amount of information in each paragraph, good organization. It’s also very clear what the goal of the study was. And of course, that’s what we want to convey in an introduction section. I’m mainly going to trim the essay a little bit here and there. Especially, that third paragraph is a little bit dense, a little bit of alphabet soup, a little technical. We’re going to try to make that a little little bit smoother. So starting with the first paragraph, ovarian cancer is the deadliest gynecologic cancer with a high mortality rate that has remained unchanged in the past four decades. That’s actually a pretty nice sentence. I mean, deadliest cancer, high mortality rate that, perhaps is a little bit of repetition. But I actually think it reads fine, so I’m going to leave that as is. Then we get the dismal prognosis of ovarian cancer is in large part due to the acquired resistance to chemotherapy. Now, I actually think that we don’t need that entire sentence. Because we’re going to fold the idea of this acquired resistance to chemotherapy into the next sentence. So I’m just going to delete that. I don’t think it’s actually necessary that we have that there. We can jump right into epithelial ovarian cancer, the most common type of ovarian cancer, is initially responsive to cisplatin therapy. I like slightly better initially responds to. Initially responds to cisplatin therapy. And then we get the recurring disease however is often refractory to treatments and leads to mortality. I was finally confused by what was meant by recurrent disease. I think the idea here is that, and we don’t know how many people recur. I think the idea here is that most people initially respond to cisplatin therapy. But then almost everybody acquires drug resistance. So, to make it a little more clear, I’m going to put this all in one sentence. Initially, responds to this cisplatin therapy. But most patients acquire resistance and eventually succumb to the disease. I think that’s the idea here. And then, we can delete all of this. New strategies to overcome drug resistance are urgently needed. And so again that conveys that idea that was in the second sentence that I deleted. So we don’t really need that. In order to reduce the mortality rate of ovarian cancer, we already know we’re talking about reducing mortality in ovarian cancer. So I think we can just change this urgently needed to improve prognosis. Since I cut the word prognosis, we can use it here. I probably also just recommend to the author, they might want to mention that the other reason that ovarian cancer is so deadly is that it’s almost always caught after it’s already metastasized. It might be worth just briefly mentioning that here. In the second paragraph, we get this new idea for a new drug for fighting drug resistance. So the first sentence says the discovery of small interfering RNAs by Fire and Mello has provided new avenues of combating resistant cancers. I think that’s a nice introduction to this paragraph. I’ll note that there is an acronym here, small interfering RNAs. I’m going to let it go. Small interfering RNA is a little bit long to write out. And I’m going to assume that the journal or the audience that the author has where they’re submitting this manuscript that siRNA is a well-recognized acronym. And I’m just going to let it go. There’s some other acronyms we might want to delete from this intro. But I’ll let that one stand. We get to the next sentence, silencing genes that are involved in drug resistance using RNA interference can allow for fighting drug resistance. I think the idea of silencing genes with RNA interference is just saying, using the small interfering RNAs. So, let’s just say that a little bit more directly. So, how about, small interfering RNAs may be able to silence, The genes that are involved in cisplatin resistance. And we can get rid of all of that. We probably don’t even need the in ovarian cancer since I’ve already said cisplatin resistance. Given the context here, I think we can assume that the reader will know we’re talking about in ovarian cancer. So we can just do small interfering RNAs may be able to silence the genes that are involved in cisplatin resistance. Next, we get successful treatment of ovarian cancer cells with multidrug resistant gene silencing siRNAs. Well, that’s just a repeat of what we just described. So I don’t think we need any of that. What’s important here is that in order for this to work, we need these novel vehicles for carrying these drugs. So I think you can just say but this strategy, in order for this to work, this strategy requires the development of novel vehicles that can specifically and effectively deliver cisplatin to cell nuclei and siRNAs to cell cytoplasms, respectively. Now, I am not entirely sure why. I can kind of guess why the siRNAs need to be in the cytoplasm to block mRNAs. I’m not entirely sure why the cisplatin is being targeted to the cell nuclei. I feel like the reader here probably needs just a little bit more information. Maybe just give the reader a quick taste of why those things have to be targeted to those specific locations. Then we get report. We report here the first use of nanoscale metal-organic frameworks for the co-delivery of cisplatin and pooled siRNAs. And guess what, we don’t need this to overcome drug resistance in ovarian cancer cells, because again that’s implied. They’ve developed this thing that co-delivers. And we already know that the context here. We don’t need to repeat ourselves. So this is a nice statement of the goals of their research. Next we jump into some details about these NMOFs. I think we should probably not start the next paragraph with an acronym. In fact, technically the author has not yet defined the acronym MOF. Although, your reader can probably guess what it is. But let’s just say, metal-organic framework, so that we’re not distorting on an acronym. And then we can define that acronym there. They are an emerging class of self-assembled porous materials whose properties can be readily tuned by varying the molecular building blocks. I think that’s fine. When scaled down to the nano regimen. It might be a little faster to just say we were talking about them in general, now we’re talking about the nano sized ones. So what if we just said nano scale sized, nano sized? How about nano-sized if that’s a word? Nano-sized MOFs. And now we get, serve as efficient nanocarriers for the delivery of imaging contrast agents and chemo-therapeutics. I think this means that other people have already used these nano sized MOFs in this context before. They’ve already been used clinically. I’m not quite sure it can serve as efficient. Nanocarriers is a little big. But I’m going to just assume that this has actually been used. So let’s be very specific. Have been used as, so there’s already been a use of them. Have have been used as nanocarriers for the delivery of imaging contrast agents. I think we can get rid of the delivery of for. It’s kind of implied by carrier, right? If it’s a carrier, it’s delivering something. So for imaging contrast agents and chemotherapeutics. So I think these have already been used in that way. We then go to we surmised that. I prefer here to say we hypothesized that. It’s a scientific study, so I’m assuming that they kind of had a hypothesis. We hypothesized that NMOFs represent a unique nanocarrier platform because of all these qualities. So this sentence has kind of two parts to it. The first says, hey they might useful because of these traits. And then, the second part says exactly how those traits are useful. It’s actually a little bit repetitive. And I think we can just jump into how the traits are useful. So, try this, we hypothesized that MOFs or just that, the large pores of the NMOFs, so that the large pores of NMOFs can be used. In fact, since they’re hypothesizing this and they’re testing it, I think the better verb tense here would be could be used. They could be used, they’re testing that, they could be used to load. Chemotherapeutics is a little long. How bout if we just say drugs such as cisplatin? While the metal ions on the MNOF surfaces, again could be used, we’re testing that in the study, could be used to bind siRNAs. So this is what they’re envisioning here, and then they’re going to test it. I’m going to say also could be used to simultaneously bind siRNAs. The reason I’m putting the simultaneous in there is that I’m going to delete the entire next sentence. The simultaneous and efficient delivery of cisplatin and pooled siRNAs to ovarian cancer can allow for enhanced anticancer efficacy by blocking drug resistance pathways. Well, guess what, that idea has already been introduced in the second paragraph. We know exactly why we want to deliver these things. That was already established, so all of this a repetition. And I just added the word simultaneously to the last paragraph to get that idea, to the last sentence to get that idea in. Next we get, in this work, cisplatin and siRNA were sequentially loaded into UIO NMOFs. Notice that’s a passive voice. They were sequentially loaded. Let’s trim it into active voice. In this work, we sequentially loaded, cisplatin and siRNA. Now we get into UIO NMOFs. Okay, I don’t know what UIO stands for. That acronym had not yet been defined. So just a note to the author, I’m going to bold that. Also I’d recommend to the author that we’ve got a little bit of alphabet soup going on here. We’ve got siRNA, there’s too many acronyms going on. Maybe we could just write that one out, I might suggest to the author. Or at least they need to define it. So in this work we sequentially loaded these two things onto the NMOFs. And then the details of how that was done maybe we could put that in parentheses. Maybe that sentence is getting a little long. And maybe the exact details are less important and could be considered extra. Potentially, you might want to put that in parentheses. Be careful because we’ve got covalent attachment, and coordinating to metal sites. Those are not parallel. To make those parallel, let’s change covalent attachment to covalently attaching. So then that would be parallel with coordinating. So by covalently attaching and by coordinating to metal sites. That now is parallel. I now get to the next sentence. And it says that these NMOFs protect siRNAs from nuclease degradation, enhance cellular uptake and promote its escape from endosomes. To silence MDR genes in cisplatin-resistant ovarian cancer cells. Guess what, again we don’t need to repeat that idea. That’s already been established. So trust the reader that they can infer that. This is a nice parallel sentence. We get protect from, enhance, and promote. So protect, enhance, promote, that’s all nicely parallel. The only question I had in reading this sentence is I think that these are not experiments that have been done. In other words, I don’t think that the authors have done experiments to prove that these things are true. I think that these just might be the authors’ speculation about how these things would work. If that’s the case, I think this sentence needs to be moved. It would make more sense to put this sentence right after we hypothesize that, before we get to the specific experiments done in this study, just so it’s not confusing to the reader. So I think these are things that the authors suspect would be true, where they speculate. So maybe if we said we suspect that UIO NMOFs will do all these things, will protect, enhance, and promote. I think the placement is better there, because that’s now talking about all the things they think will be true. And then we can jump to the in this work, what they actually tested in the study and make it very clear the distinction between speculation and what was actually done. So then we get that they sequentially loaded these things. We get to the last sentence, as a result. Actually, as a result isn’t quite the right transition there. Why don’t we just say we found that, just say what was found? We found that co-delivery of cisplatin and siRNAs with NMOFs led to an order of magnitude enhancement in chemotherapeutic efficacy. I think we can streamline that a little bit. Led to an enhancement, how about we just say increased in vitro, chemotherapy efficacy, as indicated, by ten-fold, rather than an order of magnitude. I think I’d say, by ten-fold. It’s a shorter way of saying by an order of magnitude. So increased in vitro chemotherapy efficacy by ten-fold, as indicated by cell viability assay, DNA laddering, and Annexin V staining. I feel like cell viability assay either needs to be cell viability assays, or by a cell viability assay, or maybe name the specific assay. So I’ll make that little a last tweak. But now it’s reading very smoothly. And again, very nice job by this author.