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Broad to Focus

I waited for ten full minutes to write but not a single words comes in to the page. It’s not because of the fact that my mind is empty but the opposite. My mind is full of thougts each leading to different direction in multi dimensional setting. These facts contribute the most to make our writing uninteresting for both readers and writers. Our mind is fast but not eye and brain. Eye and mind can focus on very specific things while reading. Writers can’t continue because too many direction and reader can’t follow. In both way writing becomes ineffective.

TL:DR: Too much thougts in mind doesn’t help in writing.

There lies great hardship, little bit of luck and hard works to put those thoughts into meaningful words. The meaningful words terms can be put to questionary arrows like what is meaningful, to whom its meaningful, what the writer meants, for whom the writing means, why, what, how it means? One writing can’t explicitly answar all the questions. Rather they focus on some parts. The more we think about the more it becomes vague and complex. The more we want to cram in our writings it takes more effort to follow alone and cover every of the answars.But is it? Short answer is Yes. This is where I find a great similarity between research and writings. To write effectively we must explicitely or implicitely state what and how much boundaries are covered via this writings. Like a particular research project a writing takes care of a minor length of a grand line towards one of the infinite direction. But similar to a particular research project, writing describes us about the writer and serve a piece of puzzle towards grand scheme.

TL:DR: I will be talking about academic and research writing via eye of me as a researchers.

Writing full of wondering thoughts are not easy for the followers. Here come the most important piece of the information for the writer. Why someone wants to write? Well it depends. In this blog, I want to go over my experience of the first grand writings. I want to know how I am developing and evolving my thoughts throughout the my careers. I will elaborate what I think of that will help me next time as a proposal writer.

Quantity over Quality and vice-versa

I regard different opinions with utmost respect. I believe about the number of work more than quality of the works. I understand the importance of the quality too. But I prioritize the quantity with keen focus of quality. I think the power is the editing. I can’t put a perfect paragraph and can’t wait till I put a perfect paragraph. I know, in my whole life I will never find a perfect things. Tell me one thing that is perfect I will argue. Please don’t put religious stuff down here. I am thankful to God for every single things.

Saying that what I want to point out that, don’t wait for the perfect writings. Write, write, write even if is a garbage. Work, work, Work even if its not perfect. One day you will look back and will realize you have done some good or may be better works. Nobody can put perfect theory of works. You don’t trust me! Well you might trust this guy, he was a genius. Richard Feynman of on research

Now you have contents. Work to improve it. Take some time to stop going for quantity and focus on quality. And after that tiny time off. Repeat - Quantity first with keeping mind to quality.

Problem First!

Results first!

Describe the experiments with assumption and motivation.

Improve your writings

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Avoid wasting words: Redundant expressions

Avoid Contractions and colloquial expressions

Using Exact words

Maintain an objective, detached tone.

Use qualifiers but in moderation.

Organize your paper to help readers.

Check for repetition in text and remove it by keeping information in right place. Iterate and reiterate.

Structures in Writing

Personal Summary: Writing concerns about expressing the thoughts. It’s the writers responsibly to clearly write the thoughts for readers. Thoughts runs around neuron to neuron inside head. To express it inside the pen-paper, a good guidelines are necessary. Good structure sews the thread of thoughts like an expert. The structure should reflect the big picture. It should be stand-alone to express and support the thoughts’ materialization over paper in a black-box manner. However, in practice, the ideas/thoughts will govern the shape structure to fully fit itself within the body of those created structure. A good structure requires some good amount of plannings and thoughts itself.

The structure serves two special goals. Firstly, forms a basis of what to write to express. A bad structure fails to provides spaces for thoughts to take shape in writing. If writers has still information to structure beyond the current framework the structure requires to be reformulated. So, it becomes an iterative process. This can be expressed by a simple algorithm. (i) Formulate a structure based on the thoughts/goal/big picture (ii)Does that structure holds the necessary spaces for thoughts to take shape? If yes No worries. If No, please reconstruct the structure. Secondly, it provides a platform for the writers to focus on what to put in a particular place. I believes, the structuring accelerates the writing. This can be again traced back to first goal. While filling if the writer really heat bottom of spaces to put his thoughts, he requires to reformulate the structure.

The structure is not always the big heading! It may also provide cohesion for each paragraph and sentences. We can call the big structure as Macro basis and the paragraph structure as micro basis. Macro Basis are utmost important for independent academic writing like paper, grant, proposal. Macro basis concerns with the goal and purpose of the writing. It serves the 101 of writing: Expressing thoughts in the best way. The writer must find the best possible macro structure for his writings in iterative fashion. On the contrary, In case of already structured setting, the macro basis are already formulated for the writer, which can be a good structure or bad structure. Writers should obey this constraint. I feel the writers should start with the MACRO basis before even starts to write, by considering the big picture and goals. As writer focuses on Macro-basis time to time, he always aims the big picture and writing goals.

In all scenarios (macro basis given or formulated), micro basis structure plays a vital role. The writer’s choice of best micro basis creates the best writing conditioned on the provided information. The micro basis treads the information already exists. This is where the 2.5 writing comes to play. As soon as we have macro basis we use our 0.5 draft to put the information altogether. Micro basis structure takes those and edit them in a comprehensible manner, the 2 writing. Macro basis threads key information from 0.5 draft to support and clarify each of the macro basis. Micro basis aims to uphold and help one specific macro basis itself towards overall goal, eventually filling the purpose of expressing thoughts clearly. In case of left over information from the 0.5 draft, the writers need to rethink the micro structure to address those missed points.

Personal Motto: Each Written Word Matters Towards Going Forward. So Write Wisely only in the final Drafts.

Academic writing

Whereas the general purpose of writing is to express thoughts, academic writing brings forth the researcher’s work to the audiences. The usual writing conveys writers’ thinkings. Here, the writers’ prospects are not bound to be supported by the facts or evidence. Meanwhile, the academic writing creates a storyline for the researchers’ research work encompassing the hypothesis, experiments, results, analysis, evidence, drawbacks, discussions, motivations, and much more beyond researchers’ thoughts or beliefs. Without an active thought towards presenting the research work, it is easy to get lost in the unnecessary details and fail to convey the research work efficiently in an organized way. Such failure or disorder in writing leads to the rejection of research work by the scientific community, even if the research work is of high caliber.

A scientific paper requires organized reporting of substantial elements concerning the research work efficiently. For instance, the final writing should contain necessary evidence besides the belief that persuades the readers to the research outcome with fluency. These additional writing requirements in reporting research work encourage the researchers to develop skills in a particular branch of writing named academic writing. Academic writing provides researchers the right tools to present their work comprehensively and fluently for the audiences in the concerned community.

As academic writing ensures the clarity of reporting research work for the audiences, many researchers have investigated and reported various methods and techniques concerning academic writing to help other researchers. Here we will sort out some of the techniques of academic writing for presenting research works,

Academic Writing: From the MOOC edx writing course.

course link

-Punctuation

good checklist

Paragraph Writing Generalization

source

Paragraph characteristics by keeping the “ARGUMENT” or “Thesis Statement” in the head

The characteristics of paragraphs may act as a good baseline to judge the written section and Here we point out some of the ways to ensure the characteristics of the paragraph are satisfied. The ways to develop paragraph are context dependent. Based on the situation, context, and writers preference there are multiple ways to develop a paragraph

We can follow 5 steps to develop a paragraph

To edit is divine and makes first draft better. The paragraph requires multiple revision, iteration to get to the better shape. Here’s some interesting ways to debug the paragraph.

Thesis Statement

source

A thesis statement

Organization of Drafts

source

Reorganize: To connect the ideas in a logical ways.

Two prerequisites for organizing the ideas.

5 Strategies to organize the paper

Writing an Abstract in scientific Paper

link

What things should be in a good abstract

Abstract type link

Usually Contains - (i) Overall purpose of the study (research problems) (ii) Basic study design (iii) Major finding as result in analysis (iv) Brief summary of interpretation. Based on the contents the abstract can be categorized as follow:

Tips on good presentation preparation

Constructive negative feedback helps personal development by helping us to drop the learning redundancy, especially in cases where we have some basics as it narrows down the problems we need to focus and work on to improve effectively. A good tutorial may contain lots of elements that we already may know. These known information definitely reinforces our beliefs but fails to push forward to fast and necessary adjustments for earlier ignored/unenlightened mistakes. Reinforcing already established developed good practices may be not worth of our valuable time. Moreover, in case of individual-specific problems, general tutorials provide little information to take in. Constructive Negative feedback loops solves this loopy problems by showing us the new/ignored field to explore. By detecting individual’s problems/faults/bad habits to focus on, negative feedback provides a tangential direction to explore and enhance horizon of developments.

In general, we have basics presentation skills and lots of spaces to upgrade. We somewhat knows how to prepare presentation slides and deliver them. Iterating over already known good stuffs may not be a good idea to refine the presentation skills. In this scenario Negative feedback provides a faster ways to learn by enabling exploration to new paradigm, beyond comfort zones. It detects the personal bottleneck problems while preparing and delivering presentations and enable the individual to attack the limitation and grow to standard/beyond standard quickly.

In this regards, I feel constructive negative feedback helps me better in case of personal development. It provides me with the goal of avoiding mistakes and helps me to stay focused. This way I don’t get distracted by the false lure of perfection, instead solely focus on possibly avoiding all sort of mistakes.

Here’s goes some personal presentation tips. (find where you requires to focus on)