Guides for technical writing

Pointers to information about research and writing, intended primarily for computer science.

• Marie desJardins's How to Succeed in Graduate School (this site a later version of her well-known paper How to be a Good Graduate Student/Advisor)
• Jonathan Shewchuk's Three sins of authors in computer science and maths
• Ian Parberry's Speaker's guide for theoretical computer science
• Ian Parberry has also written a guide to refereeing computer science papers
• A discussion by Simon Peyton Jones, John Launchbury, and John Hughes on How to give a good research talk.
• Simon Peyton Jones and Alan Bundy have suggestions on how to write a grant proposal.
• Dianne O'Leary's survival manual for graduate students.
• Steven L. Kleiman and Glenn P. Tesler's Writing a Math Phase Two Paper
• Daniel Berry's handbook on ambiguity for computer science and software engineering.
• The Australian Vice-Chancellor Committee's Guidelines on Research Practice
• My interpretation of these guidelines for computer science is this introduction to the ethical practice of research, which has been adopted by the CORE association of Australasian Computer Science departments.
• David S. Johnson's paper on good experimental computer science

See also Mark Leone's (mleone@cs.cmu.edu) how-to page, a collection of advice about how to do research and how to communicate effectively (primarily for computer scientists).

I am the author of Writing for Computer Science, published by Springer-Verlag. This text covers the important topics of style and presentation for research in computer science.

Tools that I find handy in research are listed on my resources page.

With Alistair Moffat and Kotagiri Ramamohanarao I am the author of Guidelines for Presentation and Comparison of Indexing Techniques, SIGMOD Record Volume 25, Number 3, September 1996. I am also the author of Reliable Research: Towards Experimental Standards for Computer Science, Proceedings of the Australasian Computer Science Conference, February 1998, Perth Australia, pp 217-229.