General Writing - Audience What is their level of knowledge? Advanced, intermediate, basic? Hard to start too basic – but have to use the right terminology (use a sample paper) What is their goal in reading the paper? General information – survey Specific results What is your goal in writing the paper? Report specific result(s) General info Rebuttal Other

General Writing - Audience Appropriate title Do you want to appeal to a broad audience or target a specific audience? “Graph Structure in the Web” “Learning representations by back-propagating errors” “Removal Bias: A New Cause of Code Growth in Genetic Programming” “The Task of the Referee”

Reading Order Title “Graph structure in the web” What about it? “An examination of the graph structure of the web” “Non-homogeneous structure of the web” Authors? At corporate research centers

Reading Order Abstract “… web as a graph…” – what “… yields valuable insight into…” – significance “… over 200 million pages and 1.5 billion links” –something impressive “Our study indicates that …” – major result in the abstract a paper is not a murder mystery

Reading Order - Paper Conclusions ??? 3. Interpretation and further work (but also section 4. Further Work) Figure 9: In, Out, Strongly connected center (SCC), tendrils, tubes, etc. Results: Structure Diameter Distribution Difficult to pin down major result(s)

Reading Order - Paper Introduction Rational “…several reasons for developing an understanding …” Overview of experiment Previous results Main results Section 1.2 Related prior work – Background?

General Writing - Clarity Language - Be precise Avoid jargon (as appropriate) Use definitions where necessary – avoid too many new definitions Be careful with abbreviations English – Be concise Active sentences Simple Sentences

General Writing - Precise The algorithm is slow. How slow? This algorithm has a high computational complexity. How high? Large instances of the problem are computationally infeasible. What is large? What is infeasible? The results show that algorithm A is better than algorithm B. Better meaning what? Faster? Uses less memory? More accurate? Easier to understand? Easier to use? First, the objects are sorted. Sorted by what?

General Writing – Clarity Be careful when using pronouns – “it” “Algorithm A is 50% more efficient than algorithm X. It uses a bubble sort to improve efficiency, although a quick sort would be better.”

General Writing – Active “Protecting the confidentiality of information manipulated by computing systems is a long- standing yet increasingly important question.” “A longstanding question of importance is how to protect the confidentiality of information that is being manipulated by computing systems.” “An important, longstanding question is how to protect the confidentiality of information that is manipulated by computing systems.” Which is easier to read?

General Writing – Clear, Active “The research process involved running each of the three algorithms on each of five separate data sets.” “All of the algorithms were applied to a collection of five data sets.” “We ran all three algorithms on five separate data sets.”

General Writing – Active By running the strongly connected component algorithm, we find that there is a single large SCC consisting of about 56 million pages, all other components are significantly smaller in size. This amounts to barely 28% of all the pages in our crawl. One may now ask: where have all the other pages gone? The answer to this question reveals some fascinating detailed structure in the Web graph; to expose this and to further study the issues of the diameter and average distance, we conducted a further series of experiments.