Dear Neuro,

I'm teaching a course in neuroscience at a lower college level (1-2 year students), and I'd like to start slowly and gradually exposing them to primary literature. The trick though is that these "first papers" need to be really well written. I mean, ideally they should also be short-ish and interesting, but the main thing is that they should be well-written and well explained. Which, by the way, pretty much rules out all Science/Nature/Cell papers, and most Neuron papers, them being so condensed and dried out.

I know a few nice papers in my narrow field, but it would take me years to find good papers for most topics we discuss in class. So I thought maybe you could give me some advice?

TLDR: Could you share 1-2 references to the best papers you've ever read? Papers that made you think "WOW I wish I could write like that"? Not in terms of their science, but in terms of their structure, language, clarity, and logic?

Thank you!!

EDIT: I'm getting lots if excellent suggestions, but all of them are pre-2000. Are good papers still published now? Or is the era of well-written neuroscience papers firmly in the past? It seems that if you have some recent examples of good neuro- writing, it would be particularly valuable!