Today, I want you to reread an old article or paper; make it one you have not read for at least a year or two. I want you to try to critique it from the perspective of a journal article reviewer. Try to see what you might do better? Don't beat yourself up for discovering imperfections, but try to discover the implications for future work. What does what you learned tell you about your writing/work style? How can you use these insights to improve current work?
Something that I am doing at the moment is to break down a paper into its components to see how the argument was developed. For instance, how the issue is introduced and where it is picked up again in the paper. It is quite a mechanical analysis, focusing simply on the mechanics of the paper (i.e., I am not trying to learn anything about the actual topic).
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