How to Write Papers

My method is based on abstraction

• Read the outline (taken from this page)
• Write about each question as a "stream of consciousness". Don't worry about grammar, punctuation, etc., just brainstorm and crank out text.
• Later, go back and turn the ideas and thoughts into paragraphs, and clean up the writing

These questions are good, and cue other thoughts in your head. You should have no problem meeting any length requirements, and the report will be thorough. I wrote for 1/2 hour and got 4 pages of single-spaced text.

This brainstorming method is a good way to write liberal arts papers as well (with different questions, or you can just jot your ideas down in any order).

The advantages

• The general structure becomes coherent in the beginning.
• It is easy to rearrange text, because you only have a line representing a potential paragraph.
• You can easily remove a paragraph (it's only a line). An fully written paragraph is hard to let go.

Outline (for science papers)

Abstract

Introduction

• What problem are you trying to solve?
• What are the potential applications for a solution to the problem?
• Why is the problem challenging?
• Briefly motivate/describe your key insight/contribution (one paragraph)
• Give a brief overview of your paper (a one paragraph executive summary)

Previous Work

• What researcher first identified and worked on your problem?
• What other researchers have worked on it?  What approaches did they try?
• For each previous approach: what was the key insight? Under what conditions does it fail/succeed?
• What is the gap you are trying to fill?

Approach

• What approach did I try?
• What is the key insight that differentiates it from previous work?
• Under what circumstances do I think it should work well?
• Why do I think it should work well under those circumstances?

Methodology

• What pieces had to be implemented to execute my approach?
• For each piece ...
• Were there several possible implementations?
• If there were several possibilities, what were the advantages/disadvantages of each?
• Which implementation(s) did I do?  Why?
• What did I implement?   <== Include detailed descriptions
• What didn't I implement? Why not?

Results

• What was I trying to test?
• What experiments did I execute?
• What different approaches/parameters did I vary in these experiments?
• What objective measure of success did I use?
• Provide quantitative results.
• What do my results indicate?

Discussion

• Overall, is the approach I took promising?
• What different approach or variant of this approach is better?
• What follow-up work should be done next?
• What did I learn by doing this project?

Conclusion

• Summarize
• Draw conclusions

References (follow the guidelines)

• James Thorpe, Literary Scholarship, Chapter III, Boston Houghton Mifflin, 1964, pages 63-88.
• The MLA Handbook, 2nd Edition, Modern Language Association of America, New York, 1984.
• A Manual of Style, 13th Edition, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1982