
On Writing Short Papers - adenadel
https://golem.ph.utexas.edu/category/2017/12/on_writing_short_papers.html
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azhenley
This describes how to _shorten_ your paper (which is useful to get it within
page budgets). This is not how to write "short papers", which is a term
generally used for lesser papers with a shorter page budget, as opposed to a
"full" or "long" paper.

If you want tips on how to condense a paper: shrink figures and tables, put
multiple charts into a single figure, reduce the space between captions and
figures, omit parentheticals, and shorten lists of references (e.g., [3, 4, 7,
11, 15]). At the cost of readability, you can also begin removing transitional
phrases and examples.

~~~
seanmcdirmid
Sentences can almost always be optimized to reduce wordiness, you can almost
always make a paper shorter and more readable, it is only a matter of how much
time you have to do this. As Blaise Pascal once said “I only made this letter
longer because I had not the leisure to make it shorter.”

~~~
52-6F-62
This little tool is a favourite of mine when I'm in a time crunch, or firing
off an email that begins to seem a little wordy, long, or washed-out:
[http://www.hemingwayapp.com/](http://www.hemingwayapp.com/)

(Larger context behind the name:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iceberg_Theory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iceberg_Theory))
Of course the theory itself applies more directly to fiction, but that little
tool can be useful to aid thinking through the process of editing.

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nerdponx
A lot of these points, like "Omit or shorten proofs", suggest that maybe more
papers should have companion materials. Having the proof written out
_somewhere_ is definitely valuable (especially for us non-doctorate-holders
who still would like to benefit from your research).

Would be especially interesting if journals started encouraging (and perhaps
hosting/mirroring) supplemental materials.

~~~
mathperson
It's called an appendix.

~~~
AstralStorm
Appendix not included with the paper is called a textbook.

~~~
chrisseaton
It can just be files in a GitHub repo, or a tarball somewhere. It doesn't need
to become a textbook.

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chasing
(This is not a statement about their journalistic quality. But:)

Axios is an interesting example of changing the format of news story writing
to be both more concise and more visually scannable. And, thus, easier to
glean important info from.

See, for example:

[https://www.axios.com/wearables-still-slow-to-catch-on-in-
th...](https://www.axios.com/wearables-still-slow-to-catch-on-in-the-
u-s-2518970213.html?utm_source=sidebar)

Compare to a more traditionally written article:

[https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/21/us/politics/facial-
scans-...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/21/us/politics/facial-scans-
airports-security-privacy.html)

I do think the way we communicate with the written word online needs to
continue to evolve. The way we read and learn is certainly very different.

Anyway. That's what this article makes me think of.

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chasing
Where's my red pen? For an essay about brevity, this has a lot of fluff. ;-)

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dzimine
Define "Short". Condensed does not equate to easy to read. For a math book,
time to read is in reverse proportion of the size. The shortest path is not
the fastest.

Here's "Writing, Briefly" by Paul Graham
[http://www.paulgraham.com/writing44.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/writing44.html)

~~~
jclos
Did you read the article? Because that is literally what the first paragraph
is about.

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falsedan
Write short papers by writing more directly, and practice this by writing
directly in articles, social media posts, etc.

For this article, I would drop the leading 5½ paragraphs.

