Email Gateway (Aug 19 2022 at 16:50): Email Gateway (Aug 19 2022 at 16:50):From: Lawrence Paulson <lp15@cam.ac.uk>
We are starting to see calls for papers, so I’ve decided to circulate a brief note offering advice on how to get your paper accepted:
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~lp15/Pages/Scream.html
Comments are also welcome.
Larry Paulson
Email Gateway (Aug 19 2022 at 16:50):From: Joachim Breitner <breitner@kit.edu>
Dear Larry,
Am Dienstag, den 16.12.2014, 14:31 +0000 schrieb Lawrence Paulson:
We are starting to see calls for papers, so I’ve decided to circulate a brief note offering advice on how to get your paper accepted:
Thanks a lot! I still miss the „great comprehensive manual to
academics“, so little bits of advice like this are very appreciated.
Comments are also welcome.
as an academic beginner, it’s more question than comments. You write
Avoid the royal “we”.
and I wonder how commonly accepted that is. I have been told to use "we"
even in single-author-papers (and by now it feels natural), but I would
be happy to use "I", I guess.
Also, I’m a bit worried about:
Yes, even if you are below the page limit: that is not a failure, but
an achievement.
Will surely no referee think „Oh, only 10 instead of 12 pages. That
can’t be as substantial as all those 12 pages papers where I can’t help
but assume that there is even more to their work than they talked
about“?
Or in other words: Can I risk staying below the page limit even in
papers of just average quality?
Greetings,
Joachim
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Email Gateway (Aug 19 2022 at 16:50):From: Lawrence Paulson <lp15@cam.ac.uk>
I hope you find my little note useful. There are some good books on academic writing out there, but I wanted to be as concise as possible.
The real issue with We is that a paper is about your subject matter, not about yourself. (Consider the difference between “I claim that” and “we can see that” (“we” = “you and I”) or “it follows that”.) Using We instead of I is a very thin disguise, and can sound even more ridiculous. But there are occasions when it is appropriate to refer to “my previous paper", “my approach" or “my supervisor".
No referee should reject a paper simply because it is shorter than some arbitrary limit. They can complain if it is too concise to be understandable. This can be a problem with complicated mathematical definitions. If you experiment was small, padding out the paper with waffle will only make matters worse.
Larry
Email Gateway (Aug 19 2022 at 16:51):From: Tjark Weber <tjark.weber@it.uu.se>
This may be slightly off-topic, but my favorite piece of advice for
writing papers is Alan Bundy's guide:
http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/bundy/how-tos/writingGuide.html
Best,
Tjark
Email Gateway (Aug 19 2022 at 16:51):From: Lawrence Paulson <lp15@cam.ac.uk>
Alan Bundy stresses the importance of proposing and testing a scientific hypothesis. I absolutely agree with him. But many of our papers are essentially demonstrations of technology (as when we formalise some theorem or verify some system). Then there’s no evident hypothesis, but papers should still be written clearly.
Larry Paulson
Last updated: Apr 25 2024 at 20:15 UTC