Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Telling a Story
A cornerstone of good writing is identifying what the reader needs to learn. A strong
thesis or paper has a story-like flow, with a sequence of concepts building from a
foundation of knowledge assumed to be common to all readers up to new ideas and
results. Thus an effective paper educates its readers. It leads readers from what they
already know to new knowledge you want them to learn. For this reason, the body
of a good paper—everything between the introduction and the conclusions—should
have a logical flow that has the feel of a narrative.
The story told by a paper is a walk through the ideas and outcomes that explains the
material in a structured way. The first parts of the paper teach the readers the things
they need to understand for the later parts, while information that isn't a natural part
of this narrative should probably be left out. A way to think about the starting point is
to consider the “you” as you were the day that you began your research. Think about
what you knew (and didn't know) at that time, and what you have learnt since; your
paper or thesis is a chance to teach the past “you” all the knowledge that is needed
to become the current “you”.
Thus a paper isn't a commentary on the research program or the day-to-day
activities of the participants, and isn't an unstructured collection of information and
results; nor is it meant to be mysterious. Instead, it is like a guided tour through a
gallery, in which each room contains something new for the readers to comprehend.
There is also an expectation of logical closure. The early parts of the paper's body
typically explain hypotheses or claims; the reader expects to discover by the end
whether these are justified.
There are several common ways for structuring the body of a paper, including as
a chain, by specificity, by example, and by complexity. Perhaps the most common
structure is the first of these alternatives, a
chain
in which the results and the back-
ground on which they build dictate a logical order for presentation of the material.
First might come, say, a problem statement, then a review of previous solutions and
their drawbacks, then the new solution, and finally a demonstration that the solution
improves on its predecessors.
The “compression for fast external sorting” project suggests a structure of this
kind. The problem statement consists of an explanation of external sorting and an
argument that disk access costs are a crucial bottleneck. The review explains standard
compression methods and why they cannot be integrated into external sorting. The
newsolution is the compressionmethod developed in the research. The demonstration
is a series of graphs and tables based on experiments that compare the costs of sorting
with and without compression.
For some kinds of results, other structures may be preferable. One option is to
structure by
specificity
, an approach that is particularly appropriate for results that
can be divided into several stages. The material is first outlined in general terms, then
the details are progressively filled in. Most technical papers have this organization
at the high level, but it can also be used within sections.
Material that might have such a structure is an explanation of a retrieval system.
Such systems generally have several components. For example, in text retrieval a
