Communication, research et al

Technical writing

My own notes:

Stuff to remember:

Desire and belief: You must want to produce good writing. You must believe you can produce good writing.
Purpose of writing is to convey an idea
Start by writing about your idea, it'll help you further refine it and understand it yourself
Topic sentences are important. A reader should get the outline of your paper by simply reading the topic sentences in each paragraph.
The rule of three:
- tell them what you will tell them
- tell them
- tell them what you have told them (but do not repeat the introduction, instead add value by highlighting and discussing)
Recurse: the rule of three applies at all levels
- first and last sentence of a paragraph must introduce and summarise its content/argument
- first and last paragraph in a (sub)section will introduce and summarise it
- first and last sections of a chapter will introduce and summarise it
- first and last chapters introduce and summarise the entire paper/dissertation
- your writing should make (some?) sense even if you just read
  - the first sentence in every paragraph in a section
  - the first paragraph in every section
  - the first section of every chapter
Prize winning stuff: If you're shy about editing your writing or deleting a lot of it and rewriting it, have a PRIZE-WINNING-STUFF.txt file where you can cut and paste all of the text you are shy about deleting.