RIP Future Work

Future work from many years ago remains unscathed. I prefer to not write these sections anymore -- they make me uneasy, especially the work part of it. However, I cannot jettison the section altogether. A situation where the a reviewer says 'It's a solid, conceptually well-founded paper that reconciles some long-standing issues in our field. I feel however that lacking a future work section the next steps are unclear, which will likely plunge our field into chaos. Hence the reject.' is not entirely unimaginable. So I started using Future directions instead. It is not only noncommittal, it is also in the spirit of spreading enlightenment -- I may follow them, but if you were any good, you'd follow them too.

The possibilities in a finality

In one of the papers I coauthored: "Finally, Section 6 concludes this paper". May be the writer thought about the possibility that finally one may not conclude a paper. Or perhaps, finally, one could conclude some other paper. Or perhaps, there is a Section 7, but Section 6 concludes this paper. Or some combination of the above -- Section 6 concludes this paper, but Section 7 some other. Or perhaps the author knows how very tedious the paper is, so he wrote the sentence to reassure the reader that there is an end to the tyranny.