This is a post that I wrote as a complement to Amos' Academic Writing Rules post.
Through my PhD years, especially my first year, I spent significant effort in trying to improve my academic writing. That effort consisted of a variety of activities:
- Biweekly, dual-page mini papers on whatever I was thinking at the time.
- Teaching students and spending a good 5 hours of my week writing for students, in a style that was attempting to cater for all sorts of audiences, while trying to describe what were complicated subjects as concisely and precisely as I could.
- Reading a lot of student reports, much of which taught me what not to do, as well as a few examples of what to do.
- Reading at least 4 new papers every week, sourced from the trending section in arXiv-sanity. Critiquing the writing of these, and asking peers for their opinions.
- Finding some good examples of how to write via my daily paper reading and by community sourced exemplars such as this Reddit post relating to well written papers.
- In addition I have read and learned from Andrej Karpathy's PhD Survival Guide, especially the paper writing section.
When I am writing or reviewing a paper, I always refer to the following two resources, which by now have become my absolute go-to's to both help refresh my memory on how to write, and help me learn new things with every paper that I review or write:
- Jennifer Widom's guide on how to write academic documents, an incredible guide on how to write academic documents.
- How to write a scientific abstract in six easy steps, a six sentence method for abstracts, my favourite.