Advice / PaperRecipe

Let me tell you a little trick that I tell all the students:

Mike's paper recipe:

1. come up with 1 sentence that tells the "story" of the paper - the main message. you need to make this into one sentence. if the sentence is a long, run-on sentence (or is a paragraph, not a sentence), you don't have a focused enough message.

1. write the 1st paragraph of the paper - how you will hook the reader in, introduce the problem, ...
2. write a 1 page outline of the paper

Here's a nice article on Tomorrow's Professor about writing. They echo my feelings about the importance of the "sentence." Some of their other advice, I don't implement myself - but wish I did!