My Knowledge about Paper Writing

Seven Simple, Actionable Suggestions For Making Papers Better

Don’t Wait to Write

Writing papers model:

Your Idea $\rightarrow$ Do Research $\rightarrow$ Write Paper[Not Recommended] Your Idea $\rightarrow$ Write Paper $\rightarrow$ Do Research [Recommended]

Recommend Reasons:

1. Forces us to be clear, focused
2. Crystallites what we don’t understand
3. Opens the way to dialogue with others: reality check, critique, and collaboration

Identify Your Key Idea

Useful Re-usable Idea

• You want to infect the mind of your reader with your idea, like a virus.
• Papers are far more durable than programs(think Mozert)

Do Not be Intimidated

• Fallacy: You need to have a fantastic idea before you can write a paper.
• Idea:
  • Your paper should have just one “ping”: one clear, sharp idea.
  • You may not know exactly what the ping is when you start writing; but you must know when you finish.
  • If you have lots of ideas, write lots of papers.
  • Make certain that the reader is in no doubt what the idea is.(Be 100% explicit)
    • “The main idea of this paper is…”
    • “In this section we present the main contributions of the paper.”

Tell A Story

Your Narrative Flow

Imagine you are explaining ar a whiteboard:

• Here is a problem
• It’s an interesting problem
• It’s an unsolved problem
• Here is my idea
• My idea works(details, data)
• Here’s how my idea compares to other people’s approaches

Structure(Conference Paper)

• Title(1000 readers)
• Abstract(4 sentences, 100 readers)
• Introduction(1 page, 100 readers)
• The problem(1 page, 10 readers)
• My idea(2 page, 10 readers)
• The details(5 pages, 3 readers)
• Related work(1-2 pages, 10 readers)
• Conclusions and further work(0.5 pages)

Nail Your Contributions to the Mast

Describe the Problem

• Use an example to introduce the problem

State Your Contributions

• Write the list of contributions first: Bulleted list of contributions
• The list of contributions drives the entire paper: the paper substantiates the claims you have made.
• Readers thinks “gosh, if they can really deliver this, that’s be exciting; I’d better read on”

Evidence

• Your introduction makes claims
• The body of the paper provides evidence to support each claim
• Check each claim in the introduction, identify the evidence, and forward-reference it from the claim
• “Evidence” can be: analysis and comparison, theorems, measurements, case studies

Related Work: Later

Fallacy: To make my work look good, I have to make other people’s work look bad.
Giving credit to others does not diminish the credit you get from your paper:

• Warmly acknowledge people who have helped you
• Be generous to the competition. “In his inspiring paper [Foo98] Foogle shows… We develop his foundation in the following ways…”
• Acknowledge weaknesses in your approach
• Failing to give credit to others can kill your paper

Put Your Readers First

Presenting the Idea

• Explain it as if you were speaking to someone using a whiteboard
• Conveying the intuition is primary, not secondary
• Once your reader has the intuition, she can follow the details (but not vice versa)
• Even if she skips the details, she still takes away something valuable

Conveying the Intuition

Introduce the problem, and your idea, using examples and only then present the general case.

Do not recapitulate your personal journey of discovery. This route may be soaked with your blood, but that is not interesting to the reader. Instead, choose the most direct route to the idea.

Listen to Your Readers

Getting Help

• Get your paper read by as many friendly guinea pigs as possible
• Each reader can only read your paper for the first time once! So use them carefully!
• Explain carefully what you want (“I got lost here” is much more important than “Jarva is mis-spelt”.)

Getting Expert Help

• A good plan: when you think you are done, send the draft to the competition saying “could you help me ensure that I describe your work fairly?”.
• Often they will respond with helpful critique (they are interested in the area)
• They are likely to be your referees anyway, so getting their comments or criticism up front is Jolly Good

Listening to Your Reviewers

Treat every review like gold dust Be (truly) grateful for criticism as well as praise.

• Read every criticism as a positive suggestion for something you could explain more clearly
• DO NOT respond “you stupid person, I meant X”. Fix the paper so that X is apparent even to the stupidest reader.
• Thank them warmly. They have given up their time for you.

References

• How to write a great research paper Seven simple suggestions