Tips for writing the thesis

And here's another link. This one has some useful tips when you (start) writing your thesis, including typesetting, acronyms, and more. See http://staff.science.uva.nl/~vdham/projects/typesetting-thesis.html.

3 shell scripts to improve your writing, or "My Ph.D. advisor rewrote himself in bash."

Fun read!

The hardest part of advising Ph.D. students is teaching them how to write.

Fortunately, I've seen patterns emerge over the past couple years.

So, I've decided to replace myself with a shell script.

See: http://matt.might.net/articles/shell-scripts-for-passive-voice-weasel-words-duplicates/.

Some good advice from the guys at Cornell

There's a long list of links with tons of good advice for PhD students at this site: http://www.cs.cornell.edu/People/czars/mentor/. I loved the one about getting your abstract rejected by Mary-Claire van Leunen and Richard Lipton.

Robin's advice

Here's a nice post from Robin Aly (doing his PhD at the Univ. of Twente): http://robin-twente.blogspot.com/2008/02/lessons-learned.html

Style: Ten Lessons in Clarity & Grace

My thesis adviser insisted that I read this book and it turned out extremely helpful. Joseph Williams' "Style: Ten Lessons in Clarity and Grace" demystifies the process of writing clearly and provides exercises and ideas that help improve your writing no matter how well (or not) you write right now.

Focus of the book is the question of what makes a sentence easy or hard to read. Only a small part of the answer relates to grammatical correctness. The larger part of the book discusses ideas such as cohesion, coherence, and emphasis, how these can be assessed, and how sentences can be rewritten to communicate ideas clearly.

There are many editions of this book. At some point it was split up into three different books: "Style: (Ten) Lessons in Clarity and Grace", "Style: The Basics of Clarity and Grace", and "Style: Toward Clarity and Grace". I have the fifth edition of the first one, which can be bought used on amazon.com or half.com. I'm not sure how the other two relate to this one.

How to Write a Good Paper: Some Suggestions

This month Krysztof Apt from the Dutch Center for Mathematics and Computer Science (CWI) gave an interesting presentation on how to write a good article. The presentation is now available on our video seminar search engine, ISLA-TV. The direct link to the video is here.

The abstract of the talk:

In this talk I shall go in detail into the writing process of a scientific article. In particular, I shall provide some suggestions how to organize the article, in what order to write its parts, how to organize and break down the proofs, how to link the results together, and what pitfalls to avoid.

Mastering Your PhD

'Mastering Your PhD' by Gosling and Noordam is a very practical book about various issues you encounter as a PhD, like attending conferences, yearly reviews, and of course thesis writing. Most of the chapters in the book have now been published as articles on the Science Careers website. One of the authors is Dutch and the other is German, it's nice to see a somewhat European slant on things.

Here is a list of the articles published so far. Recommended!

• Starting Off on the Right Foot
• Getting the Most Out of Progress Reviews
• Mentors, Leadership, and Community
• Relating to Your Co-Workers' Personality Types
• Mastering Your PhD: Strength in Numbers
• Mastering Your PhD: Celebrate Your Success
• Mastering Your PhD: Science Papers that Shine
• Making the Most of a Conference
• Dealing With Setbacks
• Group Dynamics
• Setting Goals for Success
• Running in Place
• Giving a Great Presentation

Getting the most out of your publications

The "Careers" section of Science Magazine published an article on how to get the most out of your publications:
Maximizing Productivity and Recognition, Part 1: Publication, Citation, and Impact