
Unit 11: Technical writing - Your Literature Review
First, your readers are most interested in figuring out what you do. After you’ve explained your contribution, then you can write a brief literature review. Make it a separate section. Be generous in your citations. Set your paper off against two or three closest current papers, and give proper credit to people who deserve priority for things that might otherwise seem new.
The body of your paper
Your task now is to get to the central result as fast as possible. Most papers start with:
- long motivation
- long literature review
- big complex model
- descriptive statistics
- preliminary results
- side discussions
Boring! Put nothing before
the main result
that the reader does not
need to know
in order to understand
it.
Your conclusions
Do not restate all of your findings.
One statement in the abstract,
one in the introduction
and once more in the body of the
text should be enough. You can include a short
paragraph or two
acknowledging limitations,
and suggesting implications beyond
those in the paper.
Keep it short.
Don’t speculate.
Remember:
- Literature review – meaningless before your contribution
- Body of the paper – all about your main result
- Short conclusion
Top tips for technical writing by Vince Ricci: CIEE, Joe Schall: Penn State University, Glynis Perkin: Loughborough University, edited by Marion Kelt: GCU is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at http://www.slideshare.net/tokyovince/introduction-to-technical-writing-4305074 http://www.slideshare.net/engCETL/technical-report-writing-handout https://www.e-education.psu.edu/styleforstudents/c1_p15.html.