Writing Papers People Love to Read

Last week at the 2024 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (#IROS2024) in Abu Dhabi, Cyrill Stachniss and I were invited to give a tutorial on "Writing Papers People Love to Read" by Julie Stephany Berrio Perez on behalf of the IEEE Young Professionals.

Now, to give a proper, comprehensive treatment of all the ins and outs of paper writing really requires something more like a full day workshop, and it's something that researchers in our teams get exposed to gradually over a period of years.

On this occasion, Cyrill and I had around 20-25 minutes each, so we focused on some of the key concepts, techniques, tips, tricks and pitfalls, followed by some great discussion and Q&A with a great turnout for the final formal event on day 2 of the conference.

Cyrill went first, providing a bunch of tips and suggestions on paper structures, what should go into each part of the paper, nailing your contributions, grabbing and keeping the reader engaged and general todos and not to dos. You can check out Cyrill's talk here: https://lnkd.in/dywR5rjp

I then followed up with a tutorial on how to think about the art of paper writing, with a number of high level concepts - including the "must dos" and the "field and audience-specific factors", explicit ways to think about and categorize your paper in order to enhance your writing, presentation and a paper writing superpower - multi-step anticipation - where you repeatedly anticipate and pre-emptively respond to the likely questions or thoughts what will occur to your reader (again, best done with an experienced writer and researcher).

Common to both of our talks was the incredible value of "pair writing" early in your career with an experienced writer, where you sit side by side and write (type) together - the learning rate is phenomenal when you get this right, far far better than at-arms-length feedback via "marked up draft" or general comments in an e-mail or slack channel.

In Cyrill's case, with Wolfram Burgard, and in my case, with Gordon Wyeth. As well as the general theme of respecting your reader's precious and sometimes not-entirely-focused time and energy, and all the things you can do to maximize their enjoyment and clarity whilst reading your paper, and minimize their confusion and aggravation.

Again, these are high level tastings of what are a bunch of concepts that can go much deeper and into more detail.

Thanks to Julie Stephany Berrio Perez for very nicely filming and editing this together.

🖥️ YouTube link to my full talk here: https://lnkd.in/dPSvjjUs

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