The document provides guidance on effective scientific writing, emphasizing the importance of clear communication, understanding the audience, and structuring content like abstracts and introductions. It offers advice on overcoming the fear of writing, utilizing rhetorical devices, and employing strong verbs while minimizing filler language and adverbs. The author encourages careful editing and revising to enhance clarity and engagement in writing.

1. How I write
Joshua Knowles
Professor of Natural Computation
j.knowles@bham.ac.uk

2. Thanks for coming this far!

3. I’m ok, you’re ok
There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man;
true nobility is being superior to your former self.
- Ernest Hemingway

4. Contact me
You may have comments and questions by the end
Drop by my office, 1.38 in the CS building, for a chat
(especially in weeks 2-5)
Office hours: Tuesdays 9.30-10.30 am; Wed 9.30-10.30 am
J.knowles@bham.ac.uk to arrange a chat any other time.

5. Contents
Audience thoughts
Writing the Introduction, and rules concerning prose style
Interlude on the Fear of Writing & overcoming it
Writing the Abstract – a formula from Simon Peyton-Jones
Rhetorical devices
Other advice on Method, Results, Conclusion, and other writing
hints all a bit crammed in!

6. Audience thoughts
The purpose of writing is to communicate
your ideas to the largest possible audience
Comments:
• Write for you mum or a friend who is not a CS person
• Use few acronyms, avoid jargon
• Start with as general a beginning as you can muster!

7. Audience thoughts

8. Audience thoughts
You might worry whether you will forget all the audience
who are CS experts, or patronise them.
But don’t patronise anyone, including your Mum! Just write in
Classic Style[1], which means that you assume the reader is
intelligent and interested, that the language is sufficient to
communicate, that clarity of thought is the main authority you
need, and that you should use words sparingly and in proportion
to the importance of the ideas you want to convey.
Don’t write “filler” or tell all your background reading, thoughts,
and plans! Add an example or figure if you must fill space.
References are at the end
*Sorry for the Don’ts. There are a lot of Don’ts in writing well

9. Writing the Introduction
Let’s have a go:
I. Introduction
Search is about searching for something.
Hmmm: General, but feels a bit tautological and trivial,
doesn’t it?

10. Writing the Introduction
Let’s have a go:
I. Introduction
Search is about finding something.
Better, but not much...

11. Writing the Introduction
Let’s have a go:
I. Introduction
Search is about finding something efficiently from within some
well-defined set.
Now we are cooking: It looks like we have found a very
general statement, and uncontroversial, but with just a
smidgeon of detail to show we are rigorous, concerned with
efficiency, and sane!

12. Writing the Introduction
Let’s have a go:
I. Introduction
Search is about finding something efficiently from within some
well-defined set, for example a house for sale within 3 miles
of the University of Birmingham.
Now we are cooking: Cooking even better, as we have now
given an example to further add sophistication, but also
clarify and make our uncontroversial idea concrete. eral
state

13. Writing the Introduction
Let’s have a go:
I. Introduction
Search is about finding something efficiently from within some well-
defined set, for example a house for sale within 3 miles of the
University of Birmingham. No one in search can explain how some
humans are so apparently efficient at it, however, for example how
Mozart could just sit down and rattle off an opera of sublime
quality.
Turning up the gas: Now we’ve added a controversial statement
and one with some serious “balls”. Sentence two is all we’ve done,
but we’ve already grabbed the attention of the reader, I reckon.
Perhaps we should worry about what comes next, but let’s not
today....

14. The Fear of Writing
On the next slide, I am going to show you the scariest
thing some of you have ever seen. Are you ready?
Jonathan L. Shapiro
(Manchester)
Credit* for this slide idea goes to:
*Always give credit where credit is due

16. Overcoming the fear
1. Start
2. Then Push Through to the other side
3. Then plan, get organized, get comfortable, etc
4. Then improve your writing and keep improving it until
you can improve it no more.
Let’s look at steps 1 and 2 from a professional ...

17. Overcoming the fear
Kristin Cashore, bravely showing us her “process” of getting a first draft going!
This was from her novel, Bitterblue.

18. Overcoming the fear
More from Kristin Cahore

19. Overcoming the fear (next steps)
3. Plan, get organized, get comfortable, etc.
My comments:
Find out when you write best (what time of day)
Find out where you write best – be comfortable
What do you need on your writing desk?
Five minutes a day for a year = your first novel*
*And you don’t need to write a novel, just an 8-page paper!

20. Overcoming the fear (next steps)
4. Then improve your writing and keep improving it until you
can improve it no more.

21. Writing the Abstract
More people will read the Abstract than any other part of
your paper*, therefore it is the most important part
Simon Peyton-Jones (Microsoft Research) gives a formula for
writing it, which I always follow....
* Okay, arguably the Title might win, but then write a catchy title (of course).

22. Writing the Abstract
Use four sentences (although you can double them up)
§1: State the problem
§2: State the context, or why the problem is important and
unsolved
§3: State your solution
§4: State the conclusion of your work, i.e. how the world beyond
your paper has changed as a result of your work, or at least how
it might change.
::The Simon Peyton-Jones method::

23. Writing the Abstract
(an outstanding example)
Extraneous factors in judicial decisions
Abstract: Are judicial rulings based solely on laws and facts? Legal
formalism holds that judges apply legal reasons to the facts of a case
in a rational, mechanical, and deliberative manner. In contrast, legal
realists argue that the rational application of legal reasons does not
sufficiently explain the decisions of judges and that psychological,
political, and social factors influence judicial rulings. We test the
common caricature of realism that justice is what the judge ate for
breakfast in sequential parole decisions made by experienced
judges. We record the judges two daily food breaks, which result in
segmenting the deliberations of the day into three distinct decision
sessions. We find that the percentage of favorable rulings drops
gradually from ∼65% to nearly zero within each decision session and
returns abruptly to ∼65% after a break. Our findings suggest that
judicial rulings can be swayed by extraneous variables that should
have no bearing on legal decisions.

24. Rhetorical devices
Rhetoric is concerned with the art of persuasion in writing or
speech.
Classically, it is split into three main appeals (Aristotle):
Ethos: the authority of the writer
Logos: sound (logical) argument and evidence
Pathos: emotional content
There is debate whether scientists use rhetoric. Do they try to persuade, or do they
write only to inform and present objective evidence?
Kuhn, Feyerabend and other philosophers have argued that science is social
and subjective to at least some degree.

25. Rhetorical devices
Ethos: The authority of the writer is best established
immediately by writing high-quality sentences in the Abstract
and Introduction, as well as having famous co-authors!
Logos: Sound (logical) argument, and/or evidence is essential.
Keep asking yourself whether your argument is sound ALL
THE WAY THROUGH, or does it have some Swiss cheese
moments?!
Pathos: Emotional content should be kept minimal, or kept well
hidden. But little jokes, examples that the reader can relate to,
or stuff about judges whose decisions are more lenient after
lunch ALL help the reader enjoy your paper ;-)

26. Further advice: the Method
section
Just don’t labour it.
It isn’t that important, as long as it is honest, replicable,
and is basically logical and internally well-justified.

27. Further advice: the Results
section
Just don’t labour it.
It isn’t that important, as long as it is honest, replicable,
and is basically logical and internally well-justified.
You might need statistics! (see final lecture in this series)
Don’t put every result of every experiment there, for
goodness sake. Be selective.

28. Further advice: the Conclusion
section
Very important section
It is NOT only a summary
It is NOT only future work
It IS the place where you explain the consequences of your
work (and the limits or weaknesses of it)

29. Further advice: writing rules
Write like Hemingway. This means use few adjectives, fewer adverbs, and with carefully chosen verbs.
Poor example:
The man ran quickly down the street and was very frightened at what he saw when he finally got there.
Good example:
The man ran down the street. Gasping, he could see the body as he approached. What he found would
stay with him for the rest of his days.
Note: The latter is certainly rubbish compared to Hemingway but it is my simulation, and it is better than the first
attempt, isn’t it?

30. Further advice: Great verbs for
science writing
Suggest
Propose
Indicate
Test (e.g., a hypothesis)
Refute
Provide
See
Simplify
Clarify
Bolster (an argument or pos’n)
Survey
Consider
Investigate
Meet (an argument)
Firm up
Underpin
Describe
Rehearse (an argument)

31. Further advice: Great verbs for
science writing
Underline
Emphasise
Reorganize
Speculate
Review
Satisfy
Conclude
Put forward

32. Further advice: adverbs
The road to hell is paved with adverbs.
- Stephen King

33. Further advice: from
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell's example of editing to achieve brevity and force:
“ “Human beings are completely exempt from undesirable behaviour-patterns only
when certain prerequisites, not satisfied except in a small percentage of actual
cases, have, through some fortuitous concourse of favourable circumstances,
whether congenital or environmental, chanced to combine in producing an
individual in whom many factors deviate from the norm in a socially advantageous
manner''.
Let us see if we can translate this sentence into English. I suggest the following:
“All men are scoundrels, or at any rate almost all. The men who are not must have had
unusual luck, both in their birth and in their upbringing."
This is shorter and more intelligible, and says just the same thing.”
(from How I Write, B. Russell)

34. Further advice: from
Russell and Hemingway
Start sentences, and paragraphs even, with “And” and “But”.
Ignore stupid rules that say you can’t.
Never write a sentence where the beginning of the sentence
leads the reader into an expectation that is contradicted by
the end of the sentence. You are leading the reader on a
path (don’t ambush them!).
Hemingway famously uses sentences with lots of “and”
connecting words, not “however” or “nevertheless” or other
horrible words!

35. Final Further Advice
Sleep
Walk
Let your thoughts have space; go outside
Breathe properly, eat properly
Be patient with yourself
Enjoy your reading, and all your leisure time
Wear comfortable shoes
Don’t do boring “pastime” time-wasting activities like surfing the internet
or reading too much news half-interestedly

36. Good Luck!
Contact me for questions
If you liked this, you may also like
www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~jdk/aphorisms.html

37. References (to be completed)
[1] Francis-Noël Thomas & Mark Turner, “Clear and Simple as
the Truth: Writing Classic Prose”...
[2] Ernest Hemingway, “The sun also rises”...
[3] William Shakespeare, “Henry V”...
[4] Simon Peyton-Jones, “How to write a great research
paper”...
[5] Bertrand Russell, “How I write”.