CONVERT A STUDY INTO PAPER WRITING IN DOC DIRECTLY-JUST TWO STEPS PROCESS

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We have seen generally that student at undergraduate level are not able to associate their study skills with paper writing capabilities, So I thought that it would be right to have a tutorial about how to extract a paper from regular study material

It could be an IEEE paper or paper being presented at any other level

what are the basic fundamental skills required for writing a paper

A major goal of this tutorial is the development of effective technical writing skills. To help you become an accomplished writer, you will prepare several research papers based upon the studies completed in lab.

Our research papers are not typical “lab reports.” In a teaching lab a lab report might be nothing more than answers to a set of questions. Such an assignment hardly represents the kind of writing you might be doing in your eventual career.

General form of a PAPER

An objective of organizing a research paper is to allow people to read your work selectively. When I research a topic, I may be interested in just the methods, a specific result, the interpretation, or perhaps I just want to see a summary of the paper to determine if it is relevant to my study.

To this end, many journals require the following sections, submitted in the order listed, each section to start on a new page. There are variations of course. Some journals call for a combined results and discussion, for example, or include materials and methods after the body of the paper. The well known journal Science does away with separate sections altogether, except for the abstract.

Specific editorial requirements for submission of a manuscript will always supercede instructions in these general guidelines.

To make a paper readable

  • Print or type using a 12 point standard font, such as Times, Geneva, Bookman, Helvetica, etc.
  • Text should be double spaced on 8 1/2″ x 11″ paper with 1 inch margins, single sided
  • Number pages consecutively
  • Start each new section on a new page
  • Adhere to recommended page limits

Mistakes to avoid

  • Placing a heading at the bottom of a page with the following text on the next page (insert a page break!)
  • Dividing a table or figure – confine each figure/table to a single page
  • Submitting a paper with pages out of order

In all sections of your paper

  • Use normal prose including articles (“a”, “the,” etc.)
  • Stay focused on the research topic of the paper
  • Use paragraphs to separate each important point (except for the abstract)
  • Indent the first line of each paragraph
  • Present your points in logical order
  • Use present tense to report well accepted facts – for example, ‘the grass is green’
  • Use past tense to describe specific results – for example, ‘When weed killer was applied, the grass was brown’
  • Avoid informal wording, don’t address the reader directly, and don’t use jargon, slang terms, or superlatives
  • Avoid use of superfluous pictures – include only those figures necessary to presenting results

Title Page

Select an informative title as illustrated in the examples in your writing portfolio example package. Include the name(s) and address(es) of all authors, and date submitted. “Biology lab #1” would not be an informative title, for example.

Abstract

The summary should be two hundred words or less. See the examples in the writing portfolio package.

General intent

An abstract is a concise single paragraph summary of completed work or work in progress. In a minute or less a reader can learn the rationale behind the study, general approach to the problem, pertinent results, and important conclusions or new questions.

Writing an abstract

Write your summary after the rest of the paper is completed. After all, how can you summarize something that is not yet written? Economy of words is important throughout any paper, but especially in an abstract. However, use complete sentences and do not sacrifice readability for brevity. You can keep it concise by wording sentences so that they serve more than one purpose. For example, “In order to learn the role of protein synthesis in early development of the sea urchin, newly fertilized embryos were pulse-labeled with tritiated leucine, to provide a time course of changes in synthetic rate, as measured by total counts per minute (cpm).” This sentence provides the overall question, methods, and type of analysis, all in one sentence. The writer can now go directly to summarizing the results.

Summarize the study, including the following elements in any abstract. Try to keep the first two items to no more than one sentence each.

  • Purpose of the study – hypothesis, overall question, objective
  • Model organism or system and brief description of the experiment
  • Results, including specific data – if the results are quantitative in nature, report quantitative data; results of any statistical analysis shoud be reported
  • Important conclusions or questions that follow from the experiment(s)

Style:

  • Single paragraph, and concise
  • As a summary of work done, it is always written in past tense
  • An abstract should stand on its own, and not refer to any other part of the paper such as a figure or table
  • Focus on summarizing results – limit background information to a sentence or two, if absolutely necessary
  • What you report in an abstract must be consistent with what you reported in the paper
  • Corrrect spelling, clarity of sentences and phrases, and proper reporting of quantities (proper units, significant figures) are just as important in an abstract as they are anywhere else

Introduction

Your introductions should not exceed two pages (double spaced, typed). See the examples in the writing portfolio package.

General intent

The purpose of an introduction is to aquaint the reader with the rationale behind the work, with the intention of defending it. It places your work in a theoretical context, and enables the reader to understand and appreciate your objectives.

Writing an introduction

The abstract is the only text in a research paper to be written without using paragraphs in order to separate major points. Approaches vary widely, however for our studies the following approach can produce an effective introduction.

  • Describe the importance (significance) of the study – why was this worth doing in the first place? Provide a broad context.
  • Defend the model – why did you use this particular organism or system? What are its advantages? You might comment on its suitability from a theoretical point of view as well as indicate practical reasons for using it.
  • Provide a rationale. State your specific hypothesis(es) or objective(s), and describe the reasoning that led you to select them.
  • Very briefy describe the experimental design and how it accomplished the stated objectives.

Style:

  • Use past tense except when referring to established facts. After all, the paper will be submitted after all of the work is completed.
  • Organize your ideas, making one major point with each paragraph. If you make the four points listed above, you will need a minimum of four paragraphs.
  • Present background information only as needed in order support a position. The reader does not want to read everything you know about a subject.
  • State the hypothesis/objective precisely – do not oversimplify.
  • As always, pay attention to spelling, clarity and appropriateness of sentences and phrases.

Materials and Methods

There is no specific page limit, but a key concept is to keep this section as concise as you possibly can. People will want to read this material selectively. The reader may only be interested in one formula or part of a procedure. Materials and methods may be reported under separate subheadings within this section or can be incorporated together.

General intent

This should be the easiest section to write, but many students misunderstand the purpose. The objective is to document all specialized materials and general procedures, so that another individual may use some or all of the methods in another study or judge the scientific merit of your work. It is not to be a step by step description of everything you did, nor is a methods section a set of instructions. In particular, it is not supposed to tell a story. By the way, your notebook should contain all of the information that you need for this section.

Writing a materials and methods section

Materials:

  • Describe materials separately only if the study is so complicated that it saves space this way.
  • Include specialized chemicals, biological materials, and any equipment or supplies that are not commonly found in laboratories.
  • Do not include commonly found supplies such as test tubes, pipet tips, beakers, etc., or standard lab equipment such as centrifuges, spectrophotometers, pipettors, etc.
  • If use of a specific type of equipment, a specific enzyme, or a culture from a particular supplier is critical to the success of the experiment, then it and the source should be singled out, otherwise no.
  • Materials may be reported in a separate paragraph or else they may be identified along with your procedures.
  • In biosciences we frequently work with solutions – refer to them by name and describe completely, including concentrations of all reagents, and pH of aqueous solutions, solvent if non-aqueous.

Methods:

  • See the examples in the writing portfolio package
  • Report the methodology (not details of each procedure that employed the same methodology)
  • Describe the mehodology completely, including such specifics as temperatures, incubation times, etc.
  • To be concise, present methods under headings devoted to specific procedures or groups of procedures
  • Generalize – report how procedures were done, not how they were specifically performed on a particular day. For example, report “samples were diluted to a final concentration of 2 mg/ml protein;” don’t report that “135 microliters of sample one was diluted with 330 microliters of buffer to make the protein concentration 2 mg/ml.” Always think about what would be relevant to an investigator at another institution, working on his/her own project.
  • If well documented procedures were used, report the procedure by name, perhaps with reference, and that’s all. For example, the Bradford assay is well known. You need not report the procedure in full – just that you used a Bradford assay to estimate protein concentration, and identify what you used as a standard. The same is true for the SDS-PAGE method, and many other well known procedures in biology and biochemistry.

Style:

  • It is awkward or impossible to use active voice when documenting methods without using first person, which would focus the reader’s attention on the investigator rather than the work. Therefore when writing up the methods most authors use third person passive voice.
  • Use normal prose in this and in every other section of the paper – avoid informal lists, and use complete sentences.

What to avoid

  • Materials and methods are not a set of instructions.
  • Omit all explanatory information and background – save it for the discussion.
  • Omit information that is irrelevant to a third party, such as what color ice bucket you used, or which individual logged in the data.

Results

The page length of this section is set by the amount and types of data to be reported. Continue to be concise, using figures and tables, if appropriate, to present results most effectively. See recommendations for content, below.

General intent

The purpose of a results section is to present and illustrate your findings. Make this section a completely objective report of the results, and save all interpretation for the discussion.

These were the things that you will generally find when you type on google how to write a paper?

But now i will tell you what is the secret of writng the paper easily and at a fast speed so that you can write many papers at the same time

Generally it is seen that the main focus of the paper is to focus what you have done new to already established topic

so just read one article which has been published prior to your one

extract its keywords and try to implement its synonyms in a different manner in the way your idea is like

the main thing is the idea you have to make it clear may the basic information being gien as same as before as facts can’t change

so consider earlier paper as facts and try to manipulate the facts to produce a new meaning which defines your idea appropiately

this is the basic fundamental of easy and fast paper writing

i will try to focus this more in my next post so keep reading



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