Writing Scientific Articles

The goal of this course is to give a complete overview of article writing. It treats scientific writing as a distinct competence, governed by its own norms and open to deliberate instruction, rather than as an incidental by-product of doing research. It draws on external sources such as quality courses and published articles as examples where useful.

The course is organized in five parts, each broken into lettered subsections, plus an Introduction and a Conclusion — use the sidebar to navigate, or start at the Introduction.

1. Traditional structures of scientific articles — the prototypal NLP article, common structural variants, and the role each part plays.
2. The parts of the article — from preparing the discourse through Title, Abstract, Introduction, Related Work, Methods, and Conclusion.
3. Tone of the discourse and lexical choices — register, hedging, voice, terminology, cohesion, and common lexical pitfalls.
4. Engaging the reader — framing the contribution, narrative structure, signposting, figures, and balancing rigor with excitement.
5. Advanced topics — rebuttals, collaborative writing, venue adaptation, reproducibility, ethical writing, revision, and the use and disclosure of writing-assistance tools.