General Writing - Structure Abstract – very broad overview Problem, our response, our results Introduction – slightly more detailed overview Paper Problem (into, background), our response (methods), our results (results, conclusion)

General Writing - Structure Broad and general to narrow and specific In the whole paper In sections In paragraphs The reader should know what’s coming next Use topic sentences Introductory Sections Introductory Paragraphs

On-Line, On-Board - Intro 1st) Evolutionary computing techniques for optimisation and design have been used in robotics for well over a decade[24]. An overwhelming majority of the work in this field has focussed primarily on off-line evolution of robot controllers, where… Last) Summarising, the main objectives of this paper are:…

General Writing - Structure “Protecting the confidentiality of information manipulated by computing systems is a long-standing yet increasingly important question.” – Broad 1st sentence “In this article we discuss language-based techniques – in particular, program semantics and analysis - …”- Narrower last sentence of 1st paragraph

General Writing - Structure “Self-organization is a central coordination mechanism exhibited by both natural and artificial collective systems.” – Broad 1st sentence “Here we describe an experimental study that makes a step toward building such mixed societies of artificial and natural agents, using real and robotic cockroaches.”- Narrower last sentence of introduction

Examples With the increasing use of unmanned aerial and underwater vehicles in the military, the challenges of making a robot capable of performing important missions through mostly empty terrain has been a huge success. However, ground robots capable of performing missions in a wide variety of terrains are still unsuccessful.

Examples Code bloat is the tendency of evolved programs to add significant amounts of useless code. This code causes lots of problems… In this paper we are going to examine the effectiveness of methods A and B to avoid code bloat. It was found that these methods have been effective at reducing code bloat.

Examples “Recently, in the past few years …” “Thus far, the tools and expertise required to build persistent 3D, multi-user environments makes building them financially infeasible. This may change when high level graphics programming levels gain popularity as useful tools. One such language, Unicon, is designed to fill this gap.”

General Writing - Flow The reader should usually know what’s coming next – the paper should flow Sentence to sentence Paragraph to paragraph Section to section Flow Topics – the reader should know when and why you are changing topics Ideas – the reader should know when and why you are introducing a new idea

General Writing – Flow and Topic Sentences 1.2. Related prior work Broadly speaking, related prior work can be classified into two groups: (1) observations of the power law distributions on the Web; and (2) work on applying graph theoretic methods to the Web. What’s Next? General Writing – Flow and Topic Sentences

General Writing – Flow and Topic Sentences Use topic sentences to start paragraphs and sections – tell the reader what’s coming. “Terminology for security properties relating to confidentiality is somewhat inconsistent.” What is in the rest of the section? “Honda et al. [91],[92] have taken another approach to [designing] secure concurrent languages:…” What is in the following paragraph(s)? What was in the proceeding paragraphs?

General Writing - Flow “In this article we discuss language-based techniques – in particular, program semantics and analysis – for the specification and enforcement of security policies for data confidentiality.” next paragraph “Language-based mechanisms are especially interesting because…”

General Writing – Flow/Topic “Currently the leading theory regarding the cause of code growth in GP is that inviable code protects against the destructive effects of crossover.” What’s the rest of the paragraph? “However, the support for the protective hypothesis does not mean that protection from destructive operations is the only cause of code growth.” What’s the rest of the paragraph? What was in the previous paragraph?