Writing
How can we improve our writing skills? I think we need to
- read a lot
- edit a lot
- get edited a lot.
- learn through books on writing.
Books on writing
Highly recommended
- The Elements of Style by William Strunk and E. B. White - This book is a gem, but don’t stop at this book.
- Line by Line by Claire Kehrwald Cook - a lot of good editing examples
- The Sense of Structure: Writing from the Reader’s Perspective by George Gopen - probably different from most other writing books. unique insights. See also a short article linked below by Gopen.
- How to Write a Lot: A Practical Guide to Productive Academic Writing by Paul J - the importance of commitment.
Others
- The Sense of Style by Steven Pinker
- On writing well by William Zinsser
- Writing for Social Scientists by Howard Becker (Author) and Pamela Richards
- Business Notes: Writing Personal Notes That Build Professional Relationships
Tips
- writer’s diet test by Helen Sword
- You should be able to summarize a paragraph into a single sentence.
- How many active, vivid verbs?
- How many waste words (it, this, that, there, …)?
- How many concrete nouns and how many abstract nouns?
- Assume your audiences: An aspirational leader, a critical friend, a critical friend in another field, a young & bright undergraduate student, “Uncle Bob”.
- Is the title catchy, concrete, and useful?
- Do you have a catchy opening paragraph?
- What story am I telling?
- Do I have plenty of examples?
- Are citations relevant and useful?
- How much jargon do I use?
- when editing, re-read your work separately for every editing “theme”.
- Argument at top of the paragraph?
- Cross-check intros & conclusions
- Sharp & short sentences?
- Clear paragraph transitions?
- No unnecessary words/sentences?
- “Grandma checks”: are all concepts clearly explained?
- A strong line of argument?
- How to give a good paper discussion
Tools
- TeX
- http://matt.might.net/articles/shell-scripts-for-passive-voice-weasel-words-duplicates/ - 3 shell scripts to improve your writing, or “My Ph.D. advisor rewrote himself in bash.”
- Plain Text, Papers, Pandoc
ML & AI tools
- http://www.grammarly.com/ - Grammar/plagiarism checker
To try
- headline
- Summarizing
- Revision
Articles on Academic writing
-
The Science of Scientific Writing by George Gopen & Judith Swan
- 바죠:How to write a paper
- Advice on Research and Writing - “A collection of advice about how to do research and how to communicate effectively (primarily for computer scientists).”
- http://www.ifs.tuwien.ac.at/~silvia/research-tips/
- plog comp. biol.:Philip E. Bourne:Ten Simple Rules for Getting Published
- hongsup:논문 어떻게 써야 할까
- How to write a great research paper
- nature:Publications: Publish like a pro
- nature:Publishing: A helping hand
- A guide to ethical writing by Miguel Roig
- Writing a technical paper by Michael Ernst
- Nature:Turbocharge your writing today
- How to write consistently boring scientific literature by Kaj Sand Jensen
- Abstract Science
- The Grammar According to West by Douglas B
- Three Sins of Authors in Computer Science and Math
- Ten Simple (Empirical) Rules for Writing Science
- Ten simple rules for structuring papers
- Writing a scientific paper, step by painful step by Kevin Lafferty