《Writing a paper Barcelona》.ppt

How to write a great research paper Simon Peyton Jones Microsoft Research, Cambridge Writing papers is a skill Many papers are badly written Good writing is a skill you can learn It’s a skill that is worth learning: You will get more brownie points (more papers accepted etc) Your ideas will have more impact You will have better ideas Writing papers: model 1 Writing papers: model 2 Forces us to be clear, focused Crystallises what we don’t understand Opens the way to dialogue with others: reality check, critique, and collaboration Do not be intimidated Do not be intimidated The purpose of your paper Why bother? Papers communicate ideas Your goal: to infect the mind of your reader with your idea, like a virus Papers are far more durable than programs (think Mozart) The Idea Figure out what your idea is 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.” Many papers contain good ideas, but do not distil what they are. One ping Your paper should have just one “ping”: one clear, sharp idea Read your paper again: can you hear the “ping”? 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 The purpose of your paper is not... Your narrative flow 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 pages, 10 readers) The details (5 pages, 3 readers) Related work (1-2 pages, 10 readers) Conclusions and further work (0.5 pages) The abstract I usually write the abstract last Used by program committee members to decide which papers to read Four sentences [Kent Beck] State the