Chapters

Generative Writing

How to make the first draft of your research paper.

getting started

Writing isn’t a summative process. You don’t do all the work and then “write it up”. The act of writing suggests new experiments to run, reveals holes in your argument to fill with literature or analysis, and helps you communicate with your co-authors. Because writing helps you think (perhaps painfully), it is a generative process: it generates ideas.

To take advantage of writing’s generative properties, you need to write all throughout the production of research. You need to write frequently and copiously. If you hold the mindset of writing as a generative process, you will find many opportunities to write in the natural course of your work.

Writing better papers

How to make a coherent and easy-to-read research paper.

Many people struggle with writing delightful, readable papers for publication. As scientists, we often focus exclusively on the scientific merits of our work, but presentation is just as important. If your data are beautiful but your arguments are hard to follow and your prose is tortured, then no one will read your papers. Worse, editors and reviewers will reject your submissions.

In this article, I focus on improving the “flow” of your writing. You are ready to use the ideas in this handout if you have already written a (mostly complete) paper draft. If you are still outlining your paper or have big chunks unwritten, you should wait to implement these ideas.

Beautiful Posters

How to make an engaging, informative, and beautiful research poster.

Let’s imagine that you want to present a poster about your research. Posters are a great way to introduce your research to a large number of interested people. I like to think of posters as the visual component of a conversation I’m having with my audience, which might have colleagues and consumers in it. This article is a practical guide to my poster-making process. It’s not the only way to make posters, but it’s my favorite way.

Lit reviews

How to review the literature on your topic, including how to write lit reviews in your papers.

So you’ve heard that you need to “do a lit review”? Maybe you need help finding papers, or figuring out a strategy for how to read papers?

Reviewing the literature is an essential part of any research project, because reading (and responding to) existing scholarly literature is one of the primary ways that your work joins the scholarly conversation. But how and when do you do a lit review? Doing lit reviews can be intimidating for emerging scholars, and your first lit review in a new subject can be hard to get started. In this article, I’ll walk you through the steps of a literature review, including guidelines for how many papers to read, how to read papers quickly, and at what stage of your project you should be searching for literature.

Generative AI and writing

How does generative writing intersect with generative AI?

Generative writing helps you generate ideas. Generative AI takes prompts from you, then generates text. How might using generative AI intersect with generative writing?

Additional topics

Generation, iteration, reflection

Core elements of successful research. An article which addresses explicitly some of the underlying themes in this series.

philosophy

faculty

Reference letters

A practical guide for writing letters, aimed at the faculty who write them.

writing

faculty

mentoring

Academic job talks

An introduction to the genre of job talks, and how to make a great one.

writing

faculty

physics

jobs