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Ask HN: Your tips/hacks for great academic writing
41 points by scorchin on Nov 14, 2010 | hide | past | favorite | 23 comments
This is a little bit of a follow-on from a recent post about hired writers for various educational essays. Link: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1901152

So, does anyone have any tips on how to produce great quality academic writing?

And no, cheating is not an option.




Writing style is an important aspect of modern academia. This reply will address the topic of academic style and will consider several ways to approach it, while maintaining a focus on the conciseness generally preferred in this medium.

In order to discuss this fully, it is first necessary to define the terms. The word 'Academia' may have a wide range of interpretations and it is important to distinguish in which sense we are discussing it. For this discussion, we shall take it to mean formal study at graduate level or beyond.

As can be seen from the introduction, it is this author's belief that an academic reply should begin with a short preliminary sentence framing the topic in general, followed by a brief discussion of what the essay will contain.

Following this, the discourse should flow from point to point, with joining phrases such as "following this" to link paragraphs. Generally, points should be kept short, building on each other in small increments.

In this way, an academic writer can slowly expose the reader to their argument, without having their submission feel too heavy going.

Notice also that the previous paragraph was essentially filler, merely recapping the previous points, and drawing out a conclusion for the reader. By spelling out the conclusions throughout the text, the reader has to concentrate less, and will take on board the argument more easily.

To conclude, writing academically is a combination of concise points repeated in different ways for effect, statements of the conclusions throughout the essay in order to make the reader comfortable, and several other tactics, not least of which is the repetition of phrases from the title such as "academic writing" to remind the marker that you're answering the question. Finally, you can leave the essay on a slight tangent to 'wrap up', for example: It is this author's wish that this work may have contributed in some small way to the worthy goal of improving academic writing.


How to write a good research paper and give a good research talk by Simon Peyton Jones: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/simonpj/papers...

From memory:

1. What's the problem? 2. Why is it an interesting problem? 3. What's my solution? 4. What (great stuff) follows from my solution?


there are several more good how-to papers linked from http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~mleone/how-to.html

different disciplines (and sometimes even publications) have different conventions and styles. look at some of the most-cited and best-reviewed papers in your field -- and some of the recent ones you like too, just in case styles have changed.


To write awesome papers, I used to create a draft, then edit out needless words and find more succinct ways to say things. If I was short on length, I'd repeat my initial brainstorming step and flesh out more content. By pruning and then adding content, you end up with a paper that is denser and stands out next to other filler-filled, font-inflated, 2.2 spaced papers.


My suggestions:

- The opening should always contextualize your work in light of the rest of the field. It also communicates your mastery of the field.

- Don't use big words when simpler, smaller ones will do.

- Don't be verbose just to fill space, and don't make your paragraphs too long (a common mistake).

- Be sure the composition has a well-structured argument/flow.

- Your style of exposition is important. The reader should arrive at your conclusions a moment before you do... this makes the reader feel smart, which is important if your audience is academic.

- Your bibliography should be large and should communicate both breadth and depth of research.


In addition to the various tips and guides posted here, an important missing ingredient is actually putting in the time and effort on writing. In computer science, at least, I know many people who spend 4-8 months doing research and getting results, and then 1 week writing. This is incredibly foolish, because you're selling yourself short. It takes a lot of time and energy to write (and rewrite) well, and unless you're a top-notch writer, 1 week is not going to be enough.

It's just a matter of setting priorities -- writing should not be an afterthought. You may have done the best research in the world, but if no one can understand it easily from the paper, it won't matter. I try to spend a month writing and editing my papers (often going through 15-20 drafts) to make them as good as possible. It seems like a lot of time, until you realize that if your paper is not well-written, it's not going to be read and understood, and so you've lost 8 months of work, not 1 month.

The same thing applies to preparing presentations for academic conferences. Most talks are terrible, and so it's actually not that hard to make one that stands out. The main thing to remember in talks is that it's just an advertisement to get people to read your paper; it's not a substitute! From this, you can derive many of the rules for giving good talks: provide strong motivation and background, skip very technical stuff, have a polished presentation, keep it simple, don't be boring, etc.


Great quality academic writing doesn't always mean a great grade. If you want a great grade (A- and above), know what the professor expects and mold your paper accordingly.

Now, if you want to produce quality writing that pushes your intellectual limits and makes you a better writer, develop a taste for good writing by reading a variety of works, scholarly and non, practice consistently, and edit religiously - by yourself and with others. Hopefully, then, you have a professor or advisor who can appreciate your work even if they disagree with it.


If you're like me you probably find yourself Donny loads of reading and only really underestaning it well after a long struggle and lots of rereading and background reading, and then when it comes to putting your knowledge down on page you struggle even more trying to avoid a hodgepodge of facts and details and observations with no real coherence, like although you understand the words now, it's not given your own writing any real advantage. But the funny thing is if somebody asked you a question about the subject you could probably explain it pretty well. How do you get that sort of clarity into written/sassy form?

Write a self-interview. Start with 'So what is X, briefly?' and answer it, then 'Why is X necessary?', then 'What sub-catogories of X are there?' etc etc. Particularly make sure you ask and answer any apparent assumptions, natural follow-up questions, some low-level detail/specifics to 'prove' your not a faker, ask how one thing relates to other things already mentioned if it's not obvious. Playing the role of interviewer really helps you catch all this stuff. And because it's like having a conversation you don't stall, you don't get writers block. And it keeps you honest.

Then go back through the interview and remove/reword the questions and anything that's too converational, and your essay has practically written itself.


This is more of a long term strategy, but I have found it effective.

1. Make a habit of reading books, often. Fiction or non-fiction, it's all fine. The more you read, the better your "baseline" writing skills will tend to become.

2. Now read papers in your academic field. Look closely at the way each author uses language. Try to emulate your favorites.


Read other academic literature. I read a lot from Harvard and MIT.


Enjoy doing it. For me this means trying ConTeXt at the moment and with great pleasure.


Every discipline has a unique writing style. To figure it out I'd suggest two things, one obvious and one not so much. First, read some recent academic papers to get an idea of what the writing styles of authors who are publishing today are like. Next, read some historical papers - I've read papers from the 20's, 50's, etc. and there is a huge difference. This will help you understand how the writing style of your discipline has evolved over time. Now you have two references, one to emulate and one to avoid.


Empathize with the reader, try to put yourself in their place. If you are proposing an argument, imagine you are a reader and have no idea about it, and try to make yourself understand it in the first reading. Many paper writers write as if the reader already knows their argument and the text is just a reminder, which makes the readers iterate over the text over and over again to understand.


I highly recommend '"They Say / I Say": The Moves That Matter in Academic Writing' by Gerald Graff, Cathy Birkenstein and Russel Durst. It totally reshaped how I looked at structuring academic writing and unlike lots of books about how to write essays goes beyond common sense and the five paragraph essay structure.


(I cant remember where I learned this from, might have been one of Guy Kawasaki's essays.)

While writing-

Write "So What/Why" on a post-it note and put the post-it note on your shoulder. Write "For Example" on another post-it note and put it on your other shoulder... Every two or three sentences, look down and glance at your shoulders...


You might want to read "Elements of Style - by William Strunk"

Amazon link: http://www.amazon.com/Elements-Style-Fourth-William-Strunk/d...


Read without restraint, understand rhetoric, and have intuitive grasp of proper syntax. Look to modern papers for terms of art. Study speeches, classical and modern, to learn how to craft a cogent argument.


You might want to look through http://www.americanscientist.org/issues/pub/the-science-of-s...


(Sorry if this post will sound cynical, I mean it mostly 'practical'. It is also skewed towards topics that are not 'hard science', for example much of this doesn't apply to proofs, since they're (mostly) either correct or wrong.)

First, you need to define 'great quality'. Will you measure 'quality' by (1) what the reader will get out of it, or (2) what you (the writer) get(s) out of it?

For most academics, the second one is most relevant in the end. But the traditional view is that by fulfilling (1), (2) will automatically follow. You need to examine this hypothesis early in your academic career and see if it holds true in your field or publishing environment. Will you get name, fame and tenure by writing easy to read papers? Early-career, idealistic academics usually assume so, but finding out sooner rather than later (preferably without having to test empirically) if this is true can save you a lot of time.

In my opinion, for us mere mortals there are two ways to write a paper that has great influence and is widely cited. (the third way is to write a great, groundbreaking, genius-quality paper - let's face it, most of us are never going to do that.)

- Write one that is easy to understand and has broad scope. The topic needs to be 'fundamental' in the sense that it needs to be a precursor or prerequisite for research topics that are in itself (usually) much sexier. This way, your paper will be a good 'filler' citation, i.e. many people will cite your paper in the introduction of their papers because it was easy to understand (they didn't have to spend too much time reading and understanding it) and because the topic is obviously relevant to the rest of their paper. Furthermore, it helps if your paper can be used to support a position that people usually glossed over ('proof by hand waving'). In this way your paper can easily be added as a citation to a paper the night before the submission deadline. (what I mean is, it helps if your paper is not a fundamental part on which other papers can be build, but rather a piece of supporting evidence that makes the citing paper seem well-researched).

- The second way is to write a paper that looks more profound and seems to solve a difficult problem than it actually does, and then market it heavily so that others get convinced of these qualities by other means like social proof, the eloquence of its defenders, the ubiquitousness of the topic showing up at conferences etc. Now you won't (usually) get away with complete nonsense topics or contents so you'll still need to have somewhat good content, but writing in this category tends to use lots of obscure jargon, passive voice, long sentences etc. The writing style needs to be almost the opposite of the previous type of paper. For this to work out you need good networking and people skills and time and means to go out there and promote your paper. Both of these don't come naturally to many PhD students or fresh PhD's.

(Personally I tend to write, and even post online, in long sentences, use lots of expensive sounding words, phrase things in generalities where concrete terms would've clarified the content and not taken anything away from the point, etc - mostly out of habit. Make of that what you will about the content I usually try to get across ;) )


Ever tried free-writing? I've just completed a Masters and would use free-writing as a warm up exercise fairly regularly. Not sure it works for everybody but it seemed to work for me.


http://www.amazon.com/Bugs-Writing-lyn-dupre/dp/0201600196

Lyn Dupre's book has many useful, common sense tips.


From a more practical point of view: use the Zotero Firefox plugin for managing references. http://www.zotero.org/


Read Strunk and White.




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