Academic Communication Tips @AcademiCommTips

To all (five) of my loyal(?) followers: I'll probably be moving relocating this account off Twitter to another service, as soon as I decide which one.

Be brief. (But make sure to include all of the important details!)

Don't meander in an introduction; people have short attention spans. By the end of the first paragraph or the first few slides of a talk, a reader/listener should know exactly what your work is about.

Put yourself in the shoes of the world's saltiest reviewer. Start from their biggest complaint with the paper, and work your way to their nitpicks, and preemptively address their complaints with evidence or arguments.

Avoid the word "novel," especially in a title. If your research is invention, then what you are doing is novel almost by definition. Use descriptors that are more specific to your work.

Adding figures can not only help explain methods more compactly and concretely, but help both a) break up text, and b) make certain sections of text more memorable. People will remember a slide or page better if it has a distinctive figure.

Posters are just advertisements for your research. Most should have three goals: 1. Get the attention of the right people, 2. Convey the high level ideas, and 3. Convince people to read your research. It is not a place to reproduce your paper.

In a talk or a paper, a lengthy conclusion that does little but recapitulate is unnecessary. Everyone just read you or heard you for a long period of time. Use your last minutes/paragraphs to build upon your presentation, and inspire.

Engineering is communication.

Corollary: If you're stuck, write anything, even the worst version of a section or manuscript.

The hardest thing to revise is a blank page.

In presentations with Q+A, the last slide will be up there for a long time. Make it something you want your audience to remember. It's also a good place to leave contact information.

In most cases, don't reveal text on a slide until you're ready to talk about it.

*it obviously can't be impossible, and that's the main difference between a magic trick and science/engineering.

A good technical talk on a new result should be like a good magic trick - first, you must convince your audience that the problem is impossible*, then, you show the solution.

Some people like to give their paper a nickname. "<Method Name/Nickname>: This Is What The Method Does" Do a google search on that nickname before you publish it and make sure it's not taken or it will be hard to find your paper.

With the exception of citing work as direct motivation, the introduction and related work sections of a paper should be distinct. Otherwise, you risk confusing the reader on what is your contribution and what is somebody else's.

When writing a rebuttal, you don't always have to play defense/counter the negatives. You can also quote and re-emphasize positive remarks by the reviewers. When two reviewers are split on part of the work, you can quote the positive reviewer against the negative one.

I've often seen people use pictures or videos of results for explaining a problem or concept. A simple cartoon is often better, even (especially?) in highly technical work, as it abstracts away confusing details from untrained eyes.

(Down the line, I plan to revisit old tweets with examples of "dos" and "don'ts.")