How can you write "much"?
It is common that students cannot write much when they start writing their first several research papers. Usually conference papers shall have 10 or 11 pages IEEE or ACM conference format but students often don't know how to fill in writing for that many pages.
Based on my experience with improving students' writing, here are some tips for expanding their papers to be longer, richer, and more professional.
For advice in writing each section of a paper, see my slides at:
http://www.csc.ncsu.edu/faculty/xie/publications/writepapers.pdf
Next I am talking about some advice on expanding students' writing on each section.
*. Abstract
An abstract usually consists of the following parts: short motivation (problem), proposed solution, evaluation, and evaluation results. For more detailed guideline on writing an abstract, please see:
http://www.lightbluetouchpaper.org/2007/03/14/how-not-to-write-an-abstract/
*. Introduction
A short introduction can be expanded by adding more background on the problem and how related work addresses (or doesn't address) the problem, the overview of your approach, the evaluation of your approach, and the evaluation results. You can list the main contributions of the paper there and lay out the structure of the rest of the paper in the end of the introduction section.
*. Example
Put an example section in your paper!! Some students still didn't put such a section there. Explain the details of the example and how your approach would work on the example. You can have a background section before the example section if there is much background info to present. But you can also consider to use your example to illustrate the background info.
*. Framework (or Approach)
First give a high-level overview of the approach (no need to turn it into a subsection but just put it as the text immediately after the framework section and before the first subsection. Use a diagram to show the components of the framework. You may have some bullet points to summarize the key features of each component. Then you can put each subsection for each component of the framework. You can use examples (which can be the same as the one described in the example section) to illustrate some key points of each component.
Many students initially used just a few sentences to describe the techniques in each component. When you see that your description is too short, you may see whether a reader could understand the details. Another way to think about it is to see if you provide enough details so that readers can reimplement your approach (not necessarily with the tools or libraries that you will describe in the implementation section).
Sometimes some components may be third-party tools. Many students have the perceptions that they don't need to describe these tools in details but refer the readers to read the cited papers. This is wrong. Your paper needs to be self-contained: if some techniques from third-party are used as an important part of a component, you need to provide enough details. Of course, you need to explicitly cite related papers when these components are not developed by you for the work in this paper.
*. Implementation
Usually this section is not too long. Some common mistakes that students make are to repeat many things that have been described in the framework section. You don't need to. You can list the components and then describe what third-party tools you use or how you implement them. But don't make your implementation section too short. You can double check to see whether you provide enough details so that readers can reimplement your approach exactly as the implementation that you have developed.
*. Experiment
Many students forgot to put in the necessary subsections there such as Objectives, Metrics, and Experiment Setup (including subjects and procedure, etc.). Many students simply put "Experimental Results" there. Even when they put experimental results there, they simply put figures or tables for the results and use a few sentences to describe the results. Students should describe in details what figure x/y axis mean, what table columns mean, etc. Many students rely on readers to read the figures or tables directly without using text to describe them.
In addition, students need to summarize how the experimental results answer the question/objective posed in the beginning of the section.
*. Discussion
Many students don't have a discussion section. Sometimes there are complications or future work, and this discussion section could be good to include these things.
*. Related work
Many students simply list the names of related projects/tools or just one sentence to describe related projects/tools. Students should describe more details about these related projects/tools. One paragraph for one related project/tool is even acceptable for a very related project/tool. In addition, students often forget to compare the difference between the discussed related project/tool with the new project/tool. Usually, the related work section can be easily substantially expanded (of course, when you go beyond your page limit, you can come back to cut short your related work section).
*. Conclusion
Conclusion is usually not long but not too short. Many students have a very short conclusion. It can have similar structure as the abstract: you need to say the motivation/problem, how your tool addresses the problem, the components that you tool has, the evaluation that you conducted, the evaluation results that you got, etc. Optionally you can state your future work here.
*. References
Students tend to cite too few papers, partly because they include too few related projects/tools in the related work section, without knowing enough relevant literature. To fix that, of course, students need to collect more related papers. One way is to upload their PDF draft to http://mondego.calit2.uci.edu/ra/ to collect relevant papers based on text or keyword similarity. Of course searching google with some keywords is also very effective. More other tips are described in my slides on "advice on writing research papers" whose link is listed earlier.
Another way to expand references is to cite representative papers on the same (big) field (e.g., regression testing, test generation, static bug detection, ...) in the introduction.
Final note:
One common bad writing style that I found among students in their early writing is over-use of bullet points. They tend to list things in bullet points. Normally in my papers, except for the main contributions that I want to list in the introduction section, I don't use bullet points often. Too many bullet points make your writing not so professional. A similar listing effect can be achieved well by using some highlight (bolded) keywords in the beginning of paragraphs (but not bullet points). Sometimes when I try to list things, I simply use "First, ..... Second, .... Third, ....". When these different parts are long enough, I will make paragraphs and start these paragraphs with "First, .." "Second, ...." "Third, ....".
Posted at
02:06AM Apr 24, 2007
by XIE, TAO in Technical Writing |