How to write a great research proposal
Here are some pointers to other useful advice:
- You and your research (opens in new tab), Hamming’s famous 1986 talk on how to do great research.
- The Navigators Research Book of Style (opens in new tab) is a slide deck from the Navigators research group at the University of Lisbon. It covers choosing a research topic, doing research, and writing and submitting a paper.
- Research tips (opens in new tab) (including how to do research, how to write and present a paper, how to design a poster, how to review, etc), by Sylvia Miksch (opens in new tab)
- Notes on presenting theses (opens in new tab), edited by Aaron Sloman, gives useful guidelines and ideas for PhD students writing their thesis.
- Chris O’Leary’s essays about writing an “elevator pitch” (opens in new tab). This stuff, especially the list of attributes in the “Elevator pitch 101” page, is very relevant to writing a good grant proposal.
- Guide for preparation and publication of abstracts (opens in new tab) and A scrutiny of the abstract (opens in new tab), both by Kenneth Landes in Geological Notes. These short notes give guidance about writing the abstract of your paper.
- Norman Ramsey’s notes about his class on Technical Writing (opens in new tab).
- Mathematical Writing (opens in new tab), by Donald E. Knuth et al. The first three sections constitute a minicourse on technical writing: only eight pages long. The time to read it will repay itself many times over.
- How to Write Mathematics (opens in new tab), by PR Halmos.
- Gian-Carlo Rota’s excellent talk Ten lessons I wish I had been taught (opens in new tab), which, among other things, has a bit to say about giving a talk.
- David Patterson’s talk How to have a bad career in research/academia (opens in new tab) has many wise things to say on a related topic.
- Mark Leone’s page (opens in new tab) has a good collection of links to other resources.
- Papers about measurement:
- Producing wrong data without doing anything obviously wrong! (opens in new tab) Mytkowicz, Diwan, Hauswirth and Sweeney, ASPLOS 2009.
- How not to lie with statistics – the correct way to summarise benchmark results (opens in new tab) Fleming & Wallace, CACM 29(3), pp218-221, March 1986.