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Academic Writing: Hints and Tools

Emir Muñoz
November 16, 2017

Academic Writing: Hints and Tools

A short talk about hints and tools for academic writing that I have discovered during my PhD years.

Emir Muñoz

November 16, 2017
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  1. Academic Writing:
    Hints and Tools
    Emir Muñoz
    16/11/2017

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  2. Turn comments like: I advise the authors to find a native English speaker to
    proofread the manuscript.
    To something like: The paper is well written and well structured.
    We aim to

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  3. Do not trust me, I’m not a native English speaker
    (but, I have got a couple green messages ;))
    There are no magical solutions for writing well, but many tools
    Do not depend on others’ comments about your text
    Do not wait for a deadline to approach to start writing!
    Most papers are templates (introduction, related work, method, experiments,
    conclusion)
    Follow the author’s guidelines of the journal/conference
    General comments

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  4. Academic Writing
    Hints

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  5. Books about writing
    “writing productively does not require
    innate skills or special traits but specific
    tactics and actions”
    “straightforward tips to help you sort
    through your thoughts and make your
    sentences strong”
    “Learning to use these patterns well will aid you
    in writing papers using the language and style
    accepted by your research community”

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  6. A lot about writing starts with
    the act of reading others’ work

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  7. (This is what works for me)
    1. Title
    2. Abstract
    3. Conclusions
    4. Introduction
    5. Section headings, figures, captions
    6. References
    How to “skim” a paper

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  8. Mindful reading (1/2)
    Look up for the meaning of those fancy words!
    - Plethora (big quantity)
    - Forego (quit to)
    - Tailored (adapted to)
    - Flawlessly (without problems)
    - Hitherto (so far)
    - ...
    The idea: Learning-by-example!

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  9. Identify patterns in other people’s writing
    (warning focus on good venues and researchers in your area)
    - This paper addresses the problem
    - Last but not least, [something]
    - It is worth pointing out, however, that [something]
    - This work builds on Xs work by [something]
    - Although there is a growing body of literature characterizing X such as Y
    and Z, these works focus on W, and are not V.
    - To a large degree, this X subsumes the prevailing X of Y.
    - As can be seen from Eqn. X
    - ...
    Mindful reading (2/2)

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  10. Academic Writing
    Tools

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  11. (Just a few examples from Writing Scientific Papers in English Successfully)
    Colligations:
    LOOK + preposition = look at, look for
    Collocations:
    N + N = There is little research data related to ...
    Binomials:
    N and N = That is the kind of research and development that is ...
    Conventional expressions:
    Det + results suggest that = These results suggest that future …
    Corpus Linguistics (1/2)

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  12. Sources
    Corpus of Contemporary American English:
    https://corpus.byu.edu/coca/
    British National Corpus (BYU-BNC):
    https://corpus.byu.edu/bnc/
    Wikipedia
    Search engines
    Corpus Linguistics (2/2)

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  13. Google Books

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  14. Search over millions of papers!
    “In this paper, we”:
    ● Show
    ● Propose
    ● Consider
    ● Present
    ● Introduce
    ● ...
    Google Scholar

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  15. A secret worth to share :)
    www.netspeak.eu
    Patterns extraction from an English corpus
    Netspeak.eu

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  16. Search for a word(s)

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  17. Write your killing abstract!
    1. Introduction to the field
    2. More detailed background
    3. General problem
    4. Main results
    5. Positioning of the main results
    6. Put your results into a more
    general context
    7. Provide a broader perspective
    www.nature.com/nature/authors/gta/Letter_bold_para.doc

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  18. Thank you!
    Take-home messages
    ● Read and pay attention to those fancy words
    ● Dissect the papers as you read them. Be a reviewer!
    ● Identify and reuse textual patterns
    ● Identify and reuse the templates
    Any comments let me know: [email protected]

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