Direclty from the James Altucher show, the magician Penn Jillette gives an invaluable advice for aspiring writers, which also applies to any researcher (in case you just joined the research community, you’ll soon notice most of what we do is writing: papers, grants, reports, … and not actually doing research but this is another story).
Enter Penn :
One thing I learned: no one wants to read what you write. No one does. So make it as easy for them as you can. The first thing they bump into that gives them an excuse not to read, they will stop. The first word that it’s misspelled, the first thing a little hard to read, people will move on
(and reject the paper I should add).
Now combine this advice with our previous one on making sure you grab the reviewer’s attention from the first page
You can listen to the full podcast here.
Featured image: “Penn Jillete” by Mwillems – Own work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Commons
Cool advice. 🙂 I liked also your post about grabbing reviewer’s attention.
I’m also following James Altucher for a while now.
It’s funny that he is a dropout (more precisely “thrown out”) from the CS graduate school at CMU.
See also some of his advices which apply to PhD students and their supervisors:
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/mentor-who-shaped-me-dont-ask-permission-forgiveness-james-altucher
and his DBLP entry:
http://dblp.uni-trier.de/pers/hd/a/Altucher:James_A=
Kind regards,
Alin
P.S. I’m commenting on your post while writing a (rather boring) report. 🙂 That’s (big) part of the job as you also say.
James Altucher on the DBLP??? Now, that’s what I call a surprise!