Why is this
stuff important?
* Other people in other fields express their professionalism by doing
things such as wearing suits. In our field it is the quality of the
research, and of the presentation of that research that we
use to represent ourselves
* Research, without the ability to communicate it, may as well have
never been done.
Caveats: You may be still learning how to write technical papers. This section is mostly not about that (although it's
something that will need continued work). Instead, it's about all the
things that you could do even if you knew nothing about writing, to
make the process smoother and more successful.
* References should be consistantly formatted (for example, all author
names and all occurrences of the same conference should be formatted
the same way, all conference papers should be formatted the same
way, same with journal papers, tech reports, and so on). References
should meet basic standards for "normal" formatting in our community
(for example, journals are typically cited with the format
volume(issue):pages). Years should always be listed in the
same place. If you use latex or word you should use the
corresponding facilities (bibtex or cross referencing, preferably
combined with Endnote) to ensure that your references are
automatically updated when one is added or deleted. References
should also be sorted alphabetically. More details can be found in a
good grammar guide such as "The elements of style" (see last point
below).
* The document should be proof-read. This
doesn't mean it needs to be perfect. However, spelling errors should
be caught, major grammar errors should be caught, colloquialisms and
contractions should be removed, hyphenation should be consistant,
and latin (etc., e.g., et al., and so on)
should be italicized and include the correct punctuation. In fact, there's quite a long list of things to look for when proof reading.
* The document should be in the standard conference format, for
whatever conference you are submitting to.
* Read "The elements of style," by William Strunk, Jr. (An early
edition without the insight of E.B. White is available at
http://www.bartleby.com/141/strunk1.html). 4th ed. Boston : Allyn
and Bacon, c1999. xviii, 105 p. This covers many of the issues
above, including how to format references, etc. Some other writing
resources: http://newark.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/Writing/links.html
The above list may seem daunting and unecessary, after all the work
that went in to the actual content of a paper. You may even think it is too detail oriented. It is not unecessary, although it does take time. This list does represent high standards. However, refer back to the comment on
professionalism. Papers submitted to conferences should be
ready to publish. This is crucial to understand. The impression you
make on reviewers depends in large part on meeting this
bar.
In addition to the above issues, here are some writing tips. The
following things should be done from draft 1:
* Start with an outline.
* Don't worry about everything making sense. Just write!
* Be as detailed as possible. A paper is a user interface that must
support walk-up-and-use people who have never seen that exact subject
matter before. Explain things to them
* Put drafts of figures in -- these can be ascii drawings, so long
as something is there.
* When you get comments from someone, if you choose not to address them
in the paper, write a response or an explanation for why
not. Or discuss them with your advisor in person.
The following is a tip that you will learn to incorporate over time,
but should not be a focus in your early drafts. This tip is an easy
fix later on, and likely to cause writer's block if applied to early:
Say what you're going to say, say it, and then say that you said
it. Another piece of advice is that every unit from the entire paper
down to each paragraph should have that structure. I should be able to
look at just the abstract and get a sense of the whole paper. I should
be able to look at the first paragraph of each section to get a sense
of what the section is about. I should be able to look at the first
sentence of each paragraph and learn what the paragraph is about.
Another tip: A good rule of thumb for related work is only say as much as you have
to. That means that you only describe something in detail if (a)
understanding it is key to understanding your paper or (b) a
reviewer might question how much your work differs from the work
you cited. Otherwise, you need to practice the skill of summarizing
why it's relevant without explaining the whole system. Careful not
to simply say *that* it's interesting though.
Some other advice
* Writing Abstracts about your work
* Good Writing by Marc H. Raibert