I really love chocolate ice cream (yummy!) and graduate schoolĭoesn't pay that much (you've read Ph.D. I really wish they would keep prices down, because "The negative correlation of increased ice cream prices withĬhild happiness has been well documented by Vitiello and Natarajan Here is a (silly) example of stylistically inconsistent I strongly recommend the famous book "The Elements of Style" byĪnd correctly, and is quite short and cheap.
AI, Expert Systems, or Software Engineering), etc. Know who your reader, the audience, is.We're often surprised by what is unclear in our writing when we show it to others,Īnd this is a very efficient way to identify possible weaknesses in the Have someone else read your document, even if only quickly.Some of the main issues to address are the following: Writing clearly allows you to increase theĪmount of information that the reader can take in within a fixed (let's face As an aside, for examples of excellent essay writing on Computer Science topics, see the (particularly early) work of Paul Graham.Ī reader's attention is a scarce resource that written documents
Comments are welcome For those interested in more detailed advice, including how to structure a paper and how to use math, pseudo code and figures effectively, I recommend consulting Zobel's excellent book on this topic. The purpose of this document is to summarize my views on academic writing for Computer Science. Rochester Institute of Technology (NY, USA) Academic Writing for Computer Science Richard Zanibbi