Writing and editing a conference paper for oral presentation Have you ever attended academic conferences where the occasional presenter’s droning voice or convoluted syntactic constructions have made paying attention a real challenge? Perhaps you have even witnessed the following scene: hearing that time is up, the frazzled presenter begins leafing through a stack of unread pages and attempts to condense [...]

The four elements of a good paragraph (TTEB) One of our favorite sources of writing advice for academic writers is the Purdue Online Writing Lab (OWL). For authors seeking to improve the cohesiveness and logic of their paragraphs, the OWL offers a straightforward paradigm, complete with mnemonic: The four elements of a good paragraph (TTEB) A good paragraph should contain [...]

Tense in scientific papers – a question of ethics "There is one special convention of writing scientific papers that is very tricky. It has to do with tense, and it is important because its proper usage derives from scientific ethics. When a scientific paper has been validly published in a primary journal, it thereby becomes knowledge. Therefore, whenever you quote [...]

Writing an abstract for a scientific paper Abstract writing can be tricky. Luckily, resources for academic writers abound on the web. Below are two useful lists on writing an abstract from Rice University. The first list covers content, the second, style. Summarize the study, including the following elements in any abstract. Try to keep the first two items to no [...]

Writing the abstract Here is a simple guideline for writing an abstract: Write one to two summary sentences for each of the following categories: introduction, objectives, methods, results, and conclusion. This guideline is effective for most journals. However, some journals have recently changed their requirements for abstract length and format, which means you may need to change your approach. Abstract [...]

Write for a general audience Writing your article for a high-ranking international journal offers several advantages: more options for getting your work published, more readers and more frequent citations. A good way to determine if your study might be relevant to international researchers is to ask the question: would someone in another country or working on a different subject (or [...]

To develop your critical writing voice, think of your readers As an academic writer, you must not only present a clear and objective argument in your writing but also develop a critical voice. Too often, academic writers believe erasing any sense of personality creates more objective prose. But writings in the social sciences and especially the humanities are not only about what is [...]

Preparing your manuscript for your target journal Once you have chosen your target journal for your paper, the one you think most appropriate for your paper, tailoring your manuscript for that journal will increase the chance it will be accepted. It is important that you convince the journal that your manuscript is suitable for their readers. If it is properly [...]

Selecting a journal for your scientific paper You have completed your research, collected and analyzed your data, and written a thesis chapter or presented a poster session. Now it’s time to prepare the paper for submission to a journal. One of your first questions will be, which journal should I choose? There are many factors to consider, not only about [...]

Writing a successful book proposal One of the hard truths about becoming a book author is that you must also become a sort of marketer. Unfortunately, it’s not enough merely to write the book, you must sell it – long before it finds its way to a bookstore. The book proposal is your chief marketing tool for reaching an editor [...]