On Writing Short Papers | Hacker News Reader

On Writing Short Papers

golem.ph.utexas.edu

97 pointsadenadel12 comments

This describes how to _shorten_ your paper (which is useful to get it within page budgets). This is not how to write "short papers", which is a term generally used for lesser papers with a shorter page budget, as opposed to a "full" or "long" paper.

If you want tips on how to condense a paper: shrink figures and tables, put multiple charts into a single figure, reduce the space between captions and figures, omit parentheticals, and shorten lists of references (e.g., [3, 4, 7, 11, 15]). At the cost of readability, you can also begin removing transitional phrases and examples.

Sentences can almost always be optimized to reduce wordiness, you can almost always make a paper shorter and more readable, it is only a matter of how much time you have to do this. As Blaise Pascal once said “I only made this letter longer because I had not the leisure to make it shorter.”

This little tool is a favourite of mine when I'm in a time crunch, or firing off an email that begins to seem a little wordy, long, or washed-out: http://www.hemingwayapp.com/

(Larger context behind the name: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iceberg_Theory) Of course the theory itself applies more directly to fiction, but that little tool can be useful to aid thinking through the process of editing.

A lot of these points, like "Omit or shorten proofs", suggest that maybe more papers should have companion materials. Having the proof written out somewhere is definitely valuable (especially for us non-doctorate-holders who still would like to benefit from your research).

Would be especially interesting if journals started encouraging (and perhaps hosting/mirroring) supplemental materials.

It's called an appendix.

Appendix not included with the paper is called a textbook.

It can just be files in a GitHub repo, or a tarball somewhere. It doesn't need to become a textbook.

(This is not a statement about their journalistic quality. But:)

Axios is an interesting example of changing the format of news story writing to be both more concise and more visually scannable. And, thus, easier to glean important info from.

See, for example:

https://www.axios.com/wearables-still-slow-to-catch-on-in-th...

Compare to a more traditionally written article:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/21/us/politics/facial-scans-...

I do think the way we communicate with the written word online needs to continue to evolve. The way we read and learn is certainly very different.

Anyway. That's what this article makes me think of.

Where's my red pen? For an essay about brevity, this has a lot of fluff. ;-)

Define "Short". Condensed does not equate to easy to read. For a math book, time to read is in reverse proportion of the size. The shortest path is not the fastest.

Here's "Writing, Briefly" by Paul Graham http://www.paulgraham.com/writing44.html

Did you read the article? Because that is literally what the first paragraph is about.

Write short papers by writing more directly, and practice this by writing directly in articles, social media posts, etc.

For this article, I would drop the leading 5½ paragraphs.

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