Written by Praveen Krishna Veerasubramanian
Hi all! Congratulations on your successful admit, and welcome to UCI!
As graduate students, we would all be tasked with the drafting research papers for journals, seminars or conferences. Such an endeavor can result in instances of immense anxiety, procrastination or simply writer’s block. As an indispensable part of graduate life, research writing turns into a rewarding experience once we overcome the few barriers with practice and prudence. Here, I am curating a list of general pointers that is intended to help you with academic writing.
- Know the requirements – Most journals and conferences have a list of guidelines meant to steer your writing process. These would include instructions on word limits, page limits, sections, figures, and scientific flavor, to name a few.
- Know your audience – It becomes imperative to understand the requirements of your readers in order to create an effective publication. Keep in mind that the reader in your target journal or conference might not be familiar with the nuances of your field of research. This means that you might need to offset this with a more informative introduction.
- Define the scope and purpose – Describe what the paper is intended to achieve.
- Create an outline – Start by writing a skeleton of statements. This would help you organize your thoughts better and formulate ideas that could serve as topic sentences for the sections. An outline would also serve to unify, sort and prioritize your ideas into a central theme or big picture.
- Plan for visuals – Information in your paper may be better represented through schematics, data charts or process diagrams. Envision your figures and tables as you write the outline for the paper.
- Gather and digest relevant high-standard literature and sources – This becomes important input for the introduction, methods and discussion sections for original research papers. For review papers, you might have to create an extensive library of relevant publications and sources. Exemplary articles may also serve as model articles for your own.
- Use a citation/reference/library manager – Reference managers help you organize your library better and keep track of the publications that you want to cite. After citation into your draft, reference managers can help you change the citation style with the click of a button. Collaborative writing exercises are also simplified with a shared library. Endnote Basic, Mendeley and Zotero are a few examples of free and popular library managers used by academic writers. This comparison of the common citation managers will help you choose yours.
- Discuss authorship beforehand – Disagreements on authorships can turn out to be a sticky issue with the potential to affect the relationship between academic collaborators. It is best to bring up the topic of authorship even as a research work is being proposed and done. Discuss with your supervisor/PI and collaborators to make sure everybody is aware of their responsibilities and outcomes.
- Write, edit, review, repeat… – Writing is an iterative process, and you would most likely go through multiple cycles of idea synthesis, drafting, editing and clean-up. Share your outline/rough draft for review by your collaborators, peers, and PI so that you can get feedback early in this process. This would ensure that your paper is organized in a manner that is most logical and elegant.
- Be mindful of plagiarism and its risks – Always ensure originality in your written pieces. Plagiarism is not tolerated at any level in graduate school. In addition, always remember to cite and credit any data that you might borrow, to its original authors.
Once you have written a complete first draft, you would need to address lower order concerns like grammar, punctuation and spelling errors. A good word processor can do the heavy lifting in this effort. In addition, it might help to know the various elements of academic writing mechanics. This Online Writing Lab describes various strategies that can help with the writing process.
UCI offers several resources that can help you with writing your next academic paper –
- Program in Academic English – This program offered by the School of Humanities, has been engineered to benefit non-native speakers. It aims to polish their writing, conversational, and presentation skills.
- Writing Support at Graduate Resource Center (GRC) – The GRC provides writing support services for the diverse academic needs of graduate students. It organizes the ESL/ELL academic writing workshop series that address specific grammar and language mechanics of a formal English composition. Writing consultants at the GRC also provide individual meetings with students to review academic content (publications, dissertation/thesis, conference paper, resume/CV, cover letters, etc.) and organize boot camps and workshops periodically, relating to scholarly writing. The GRC also hosts targeted writing groups and offers dedicated writing space for graduates.
- UCI Libraries – The library would be your go-to place for research needs and the UCI libraries seldom disappoint you. The UCI library website is a great place to start locating various UCI libraries and exploring their resources. It provides helpful information and tutorials on topics, such as browsing and borrowing books, interlibrary loans from other UC libraries, research guides and tools, accessing multimedia resources, and off-campus resource access. One can also find help exploring subject-specific content by contacting subject librarians. The library also provides dissertation consultation services to critique theses for formatting requirements.
I hope this was helpful. Wish you good luck with your writing exercises!