Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 5
Writing a Paper
I used to think about my sentences before writing them down;
but … I have found that it saves time to scribble in a vile hand
whole pages as quickly as I possibly can … Sentences thus scrib-
bled down are often better ones than I could have written delib-
erately.
Charles Darwin
Autobiography
In every research project, a stage is reached at which it makes sense to begin to write
up. A good principle is to begin early: if it is possible to start writing, then writing
should start. Shaping the research and its outcomes into a write-up is an effective
way of giving structure to a project, even if the work itself has not yet begun.
The three main phases of a write-up are organizing materials so that the work tells
a story, giving this story the structure of a thesis or of an academic paper, and actually
writing. A paper or thesis, then, is an outcome of a cycle of activity, from speculation
through definition and experimentation to write-up, with a range of obstacles and
issues that can arise on the way.
But it is much more than a record of the work. Although a research paper or
thesis is the result of a process of research that may have been proceeding for months
or years, with just a few pages to represent months or more of activity by several
people a paper may be only a small window into the work that was done. A thesis
is more substantial, and may in some respects be a complete piece of research, but
even so represents a digesting of the learning and outcomes into a relatively compact
document. How to proceed to a complete document is the topic of this chapter.
The Scope of a Paper
To begin a paper, the first task is to describe your aims. An effective exercise is to
write down everything that motivated you to start the research. What did you want
to achieve? What problems did you expect to address? What makes the problems
interesting? Next, define the scope of the work that you plan to write up. To do so, it is
necessary to make choices about what to include, and thus it is necessary to identify
