Writing Tips

Writing Tips

“Either write something worth reading, or do something worth writing.” 
-- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)

• The Science of Scientific Writing, by George D. Gopen and Judith A. Swan, American Scientist, 78 (6) 550-558. (mainly low-level) 
  low-level points:
  
  • Follow a subject as soon as possible with its verb.
  • "First things first". Place "old information" and topic in the topic positions for linkage backward and contextualization forward.
  • "Save the best for last". Place in stress positions the "new information" you want the read to emphasize.
  • Articulate the action of every clause or sentence in its verb.
  From a linguistic point of view, many of these issues resemble Joshi's centering theory on discourse and TAG theory for locality.
  You can nearly always reorder things (esp. PPs) so that surface locality constraints are satisfied. Note: these points are language-specific. 
  A summary by Lawrence A. Crowl.

• Simon Peyton Jones: How to write a research paper. [strongly recomomended!] (mainly high-level)
  • talk video [ram]
  • slides [pdf]
  Summary:
  • Intro section: describe and motivate the problem, then list your contributions explicitly, and that's it.
  • No "rest of the paper is organized as follows" paragraph in a conference paper, as it does not convey any extra information in a relatively short paper. Instead, use forward refs in the list of contributions. (For longer journal papers, however, this paragraph is often needed.)
  • No "related work" section before describing your idea, as it bores the readers and clogs the information flow.
  • Use examples and only present the general case. (however, in your talk, only present a special case.)
  • Related work: giving credit to others does not hurt.
  I wish I had been told these points (esp. #2 and #3) earlier, when I was very confused at where to put the "previous work" section. We have so many negative examples in published papers according to these points. For example, as a beginner you would easily end up having a "rest of the paper" paragraph because it seems so trendy in conferences.

• Mark-Jan Nederhof: Common Pitfalls in Academic Writing. (both high-level and low-level, including LaTeX)

• Norman Ramsey's resources and his Learn Technical Writing in Two Hours per Week.

• Classics
  • Williams' "STYLE: .* Clarity and Grace" series
    • STYLE: Ten lessons in Clarity and Grace, 9th edi., 2006 (304 pp.)
    • STYLE: Basics of Clarity and Grace. 2nd edition, 2005. 160 pp. (a pocket-size summary of the above, without exercises)
    • STYLE: Towards Clarity and Grace. 1995, 226 pp.

  • Strunk and White: The Elements of Style, 4th edi., Longman, 1999. (low-level)

  • Claire K. Cook: Line by Line, Houghton Mifflin, 1986. (very low-level)

• Other resources (not highly recommended)
  • How to Write a Paper (by Mike Ashby). Note: for hard sciences (physics, chemistry, biology, etc.) and engineering fields, not very suitable for computer science or mathematics.

http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~lhuang3/writing/