More Suggestions about the Projects

Papers You Read vs Your Project Paper

If you are interested in applied mathematics, you will often see papers and talk abstracts that begin with something like:

"Since RFIDs (Radio Frequency Identification Devices) became practical in the early '90s, the industry has grown to more than 20 billion dollars of device sales per year. Mathematical models for the effective use of RFIDs have been studied by Arnot (1995), Arnot and Saidnot (1996), Saidnot and Williams (1997), Greenblad, Rose, et. al. (1998), Smith and Wesson (2002), Sonny and Cher (2004)..."

BORING! And ... Perhaps SINFUL

Sometimes convention forces one to write this way. If you want to publish in the Journal of RFIDs, your paper should pretty well conform to the modal style of JoRFIDs. Still, you should not be fooled by the (potential) wickedness of this kind of writing:

So, this is sinful, but sin exists in the world. Frankly, we all participate in the fun from time to time, and I can give you examples from my own work. Still, we should aim to do better when we can.

An Opportunity to Simple, Honest, and Genuinely Instructive

You will have plenty of chances in your life to write in the style of my imagined journal (apologies if JRFID really exists). On the other hand, here you have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to "cut the crap."

What I hope you will ask and answer for yourself are questions like these:

  1. Is the thing that I am hoping to explain in my paper genuinely interesting to me?
  2. Do I think that I have become a more effective researcher by knowing what I am explaining here?
  3. Can I explain this material honestly and clearly?
  4. If I really must be incomplete at some point, can I isolate that point and warn the reader about what has as to be learned elsewhere (or what may still be unknown)?
  5. Have I stripped away all inessential jargon?
  6. Is my notation the "best in the industry"?
  7. Have I presented this material in the simplest way that still retains its essential content?
  8. Have I given examples to illustrate all the key points.
  9. Have I made good use of well placed and well labled, figures, graphs, and tables?
  10. Have I been resolutely honest with myself and my reader?

It is a high standard to aim for affirmative answers to all of these questions. Still, there is great value at making the best effort you can make.

News You Can Use

Imagine a talk or paper where the author says, "Here is a novel fact that I am confident that you will be able to use sometime in the next year."

Damn, wouldn't that be great? We all read papers and go to talks with the hope of getting some "news to use."

In your paper you should at consider having a section called "News You Can Use." If a section does not make sense, you should at least address "news you can use" in your final section.

More than Cosmetics

A top-level management consultant once told me at a Wharton event "It's all about hygiene." I did not see his comment as a misplaced sentiment; I saw it as a genuine insight.

Papers that are poorly written (or simply ugly in someway) are punished. This is true at every level of ex ante quality of the work.

I know a person or too who will argue that there are exceptions, and they can cite the obscurities in some of the writing of Fermat, Riemann, Gauss, or Grothendieck. Point granted: This page is not being written for super geniuses. If you think writing poorly can increase your impact --- good luck!

If you want to see great writing study Euler, Cauchy, Landau, Polya, Kac, Lax, Lovasz, or Tao. These authors are consistently patient, careful, and clear. Their work is filled with examples. They are unafraid to explain the "simple" bits or to underscore ideas that might be of further use.

If they can have the courage to do these things, then we can have it too.

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