Few months ago I participated a course on writing articles with Hakan Erdogmus. It was really interesting to see how a few questions can improve the quality of the paper and probably help you to take away lot of things that are just there in the paper being really necessary. I want to write them here so that i do not forget and can reuse it on later occasions. The four questions/investigations are:
1. In the land of ……
2. Darkness Reigned because…….
3. Light will return if ……….
4. I know this because ……………
1. investigates the context of the paper, what is it about and what it suggests.
2. this finds out the lacks in the paper, is anything missing, what are the things that you think are missing here?
3.What will make it better> what will remove the lacks of 2. ?
4. say your reasons behind the lacks in (2) and remedies in (3) or say your positive feed backs if the paper is already good. In other words, if there are lacks, say why you think these are lacks and same way, if you think the paper describes its message and process well, mention why you think it is documented well.
I assume that we keep in mind some of these questions while writing an article, but the problem is we often get stuck ourselves in a assertive mode, where we only describe the results and/or defend our claims. But we do not see the paper as an outsider, a third person, as a reader and a critic who would like to find the answers of the four questions. Once we have taken that role, either by yourself or a colleague/friend, the paper gets a better shape with inclusion of probable missing parts and exclusion of extraneous parts.
* please note that the process mentioned above was suggested by Hakan Erdogmus (http://hakanerdogmus.net/weblog/), so be aware of the copyright issues if you want to use it in some purpose other than your personal learning and practicing.
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