Writing and presenting tips for researchers

General principles for writing

Readability

• Focus on one central and novel contribution of your paper and be concrete about it.
• Write in a triangular style: start with the main result, followed by supporting details.
• Your reader is busy and impatient; make it easy for them to skim.
• A good paper is not a travelogue of your search process. We don’t care about the hundreds of things you tried that did not work. Save it for your memoirs.
• Keep the paper as short as possible. Every word must count. As you edit the paper ask yourself constantly, “can I make the same point in less space?” and “Do I really have to say this?”
• Pay attention to how good papers are written and structured. Search for papers in good journals in your field.

Conciseness and simplicity

• Don’t repeat things. If you said it once, you don’t have to say it again. “In other words” is a sign of trouble. Go back and say it once, right.
• Simple is better. Most students think they have to dress up a paper to look impressive. The exact opposite is true: The less math used, the better. The simpler the estimation technique, the better.
• Use simple short words, not big fancy words. “Use” not “utilize.” “Several” not “diverse.”
• Avoid technical jargon.
• Avoid the naked “this.” “This shows that carbon uptake remained stable…” This what? “This regression shows that….” is fine.
• It is usually the case that most good writers find that everything before the “that” should be deleted from a sentence. Read that sentence again starting at “Everything”: it’s true, isn’t it? Just say what you want to say. Search for “that” in the document to get rid of these. Similarly, strike “A comment is in order at this point.” Just make the comment.
• Don’t use adjectives to describe your work: “striking results,” “very significant” coefficients, etc. If the work merits adjectives, the world will give them to you.
• When describing the sign of a causal link, one direction is enough. “When Jane goes up (down) on the teeter-totter, Billy goes down (up) on the other side,” the stuff in the parentheses is distracting. Add “and vice versa” if you must.

Structure and organization

• Follow the rule “first describe what you do, then explain it, and compare it to alternatives”. For example, in describing a data transformation, just start with, say, “I regrid the data with a bilinear interpolation to a 1-degree grid”. Then tell us why regridding is important, and then talk about different regridding methods. Most writers do all this in the reverse order.
• Previews and recalls are a good sign of poor organization. “As we will see in Table 6,” or “Recall from section 2,” often means you didn’t put things in the right order.
• People forget variable names and abbreviations. Define them clearly and in an easy-to-find place. This is the one place where a little repetition isn’t bad. “I find the best fit when the elasticity of substitution θ equals 3.” is better than “I find the best fit when θ = 3.”

Tone and style

• “I” is fine. Don’t use the royal “we” on a sole-authored paper. I use “we” to mean “you (the reader) and I.” “We can see the hockey stick pattern in Figure 1” is much better than “The hockey stick pattern can be seen in Figure 1.” (passive) or “One can see the hockey stick pattern in Figure 1.” (who, exactly?)
• Much bad writing comes down to trying to avoid responsibility for what you’re saying. That’s why people resort to passive sentences, “it should be noted that,” poor organization with literature first and your idea last, and so on. Take a deep breath, and take responsibility for what you’re writing.
• Present tense is usually best. You can say “Dasgupta (2001) find that” even though 2001 was a while ago.
• Keep the tense consistent. Don’t start a paragraph in the past tense and finish it in the future.

Sections of a paper

Title page

• Include your name, affiliation, and contact information so readers can reach you. Add the date to indicate the version of the paper.

Abstract

• The main function of the abstract is to communicate the one central and novel contribution clearly and concisely in 100-150 words.
• Avoid discussing the literature in the abstract.
• Don’t write “Data are analyzed, theorems are proved, discussion is made..”

Introduction

• Start with what you do in this paper and why it matters.
• The first sentence is the hardest. Do NOT start with philosophy such as “Climate scientists have long debated the causes of global warming…”
• Avoid detailed literature reviews in the introduction.
• Don’t write a “roadmap” paragraph: “In Section 2, we discuss the literature. In Section 3…”. Readers will figure it out when they get there.

Literature Review (if necessary)

• Make it a separate section so uninterested readers can skip it.
• Keep it brief and relevant, it is not necessary to cite every single paper in the literature.
• The main point of the literature review should be to set your manuscript off against the 2 or 3 closest current papers and to give proper credit to people who deserve priority for things that might otherwise seem new in your paper.
• Be generous in your citations. You do not have to say that everyone else did it all wrong for your research to be interesting.

Results

• Get to the central result as fast as possible.
• Most papers do precisely the opposite: They have a long motivation, a long literature review, a big complex model that then gets ignored, descriptive statistics, preliminary results, a side discussion or two and then finally Table 12 of “main estimates.” By then we’re all asleep.
• Here’s the rule: There should be nothing before the main result that is not necessary to understand the main result.
• Use the appendix for side results, extensions, etc.

Discussion

• Discuss the implications of your results and how they relate to the literature.
• Put your results in the broader context of the field.
• Avoid repeating the results; focus on the main takeaways.
• Be honest about the limitations of your study.
• Avoid speculation.

Conclusion (if necessary)

• The inclusion of a conclusion section should not be the default. If you did a good job of explaining your contribution in the introduction, and then documenting those claims in the body of the paper (writing in good triangular style), then saying it all over again is pointless.
• Unfortunately, some people skip to the conclusion to look for the main result, but that’s because they are used to authors who don’t explain it well enough in the body of the paper.
• Conclusions should be short. Don’t repeat your findings. One statement in the abstract, one in the introduction and once more in the results/discussion should be enough.
• Don’t repeat the abstract in past tense.
• A proper conclusion should tell the reader what they could do with the newly acquired knowledge. Answer the question “So what?”. You can focus on limitations and implications for future research and policy.

Methods

• Use active tense. Not: “it is assumed that τ = 3”, “data were constructed as follows..” Gee, I wonder who did that assuming and constructing? Search for “is” and “are” in the document to root out every single passive sentence.
• Be clear about the steps you took to arrive at your results. Others should be able to replicate your work.
• Cite the data sources and describe the data in detail. This is a good place for a table.
• If needed, provide detailed methods in the appendix.

Appendices

• “Appendices are a great tool. Take that delicious section that has so many insightful comments on the literature, the general version of the model, the 57 robustness exercises that you did, and dump them into an appendix.”
• Provide enough detail for others to replicate your work (Open Science).

Tables

• Make each table self-contained with a clear caption that explains the table. Don’t make the reader go back to the text looking for the definition of a Greek letter.
• No number should appear in a table that is not discussed in the text. If it’s not worth writing about in the text, it’s not worth putting in the table. “Row 1 of Table 3 shows a U-shaped pattern” is ok. “Table 5 shows summary statistics” (period) is not ok. Send the latter to the appendix.
• Use the correct number of significant digits, not whatever the program spits out. 4.56783 with a standard error of 0.6789 should be 4.6 with a standard error of 0.7.

Figures

• Good figures make a paper come alive, and they communicate patterns in the data much better than big tables of numbers.
• Make each figure self-contained with clear captions that explain the content of the figure and label the axes.
• Increase the font size until you think it is too big, then you are probably at the right size (Thank you, Wilfried Rickels).
• Make sure it is visible in black and white and colourblind friendly.

Footnotes

• Don’t use footnotes for parenthetical comments. If it’s important, put it in the text. If it’s not important, delete it.
• Use footnotes only for things that the typical reader genuinely can skip, but a few readers might want to have attached to the current point. Long lists of references, simple bits of algebra, or other documentation are good candidates for footnotes.

Presenting tips

• Write what you are going to say before making the slides. The slides are there to support your talk, not to replace it.
• Get to the main result quickly; you will not believe how fast the time will go by. We can’t skim to the important stuff in a seminar.
• You don’t need any literature review or motivation in a presentation.
• Don’t make slides with a bullet point for every word you intend to say. This forces you into a preplanned order, and then you can’t change on the fly when you figure out how fast time is going by.
• Slides are fine that only contain equations, tables and figures — things we really need to see. At most use words for the one or two really important things you want people to remember.
• If you have too much junk on the slides, people will read the slides and not listen to you. Your slides are there to support your talk, not to replace it.
• You have to leave slides up for a decent amount of time in order for people to digest them. That means you will not be able to put up 1 slide per minute!
• Don’t rush through the slides. Plan less material than you think you can cover. There’s nothing wrong with ending early!
• Listen to the questions, all the way to the end, then count to three before answering.
• You cannot make it too simple. Most presenters overestimate how much theory people can digest in one sitting, and how quickly they can memorize and digest models and results.
• Speak loudly, slowly and clearly.