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Three Sins of Authors in Computer Science and Math

cs.cmu.edu · 1,877 words · saved by 3 readers

Most of us learn how to write technical articles by osmosis. After reading a hundred or so papers, we unconsciously pick up the common patterns of the field and begin to imitate them. This phenomenon is largely beneficial, but there are several truly odious habits that are almost universally and inadvertently adopted without critical evaluation. Hence, I've distilled below a few of my opinions on what I see in the math and computing literature, and on how you can avoid annoying me in the future. I realize that the first priority of computer scientists and mathematicians is not literary artistry. I am not complaining about mere bad writing; any scientific field will have its fair share, and I'm quite willing to accept the occasional incoherent paragraph and unlabeled axis as the price I have to pay for being more employable than a Literature major. Rather, my complaints here are about bad writing that's considered good. The crimes I enumerate below are practices that are accepted or enc

Three Sins of Authors in Computer Science and Math Three Sins of Authors in Computer Science and Math Over the last seven years, I've read perhaps four hundred papers in computer science and math. Thirty or so were well-written. These anomalies aside, extracting meaning from most of the papers was like sucking a camel through the eye of the proverbial needle upon which a thousand angels were dancing on my head, if I mix my metaphors right. Most of us learn how to write technical articles by osmosis. After reading a hundred or so papers, we unconsciously pick up the common patterns of the field

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