Tips and Resources for Writing Computer Science Papers

Web sites

• The Thesis Whisperer: writing, book reviews, ...

Tools

• Hemingway App: rate and simplify writing

Books

• Writing for Computer Science, by Justin Zobel, 2004.
• The Elements of Style. William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White. Macmillan Publishing Co., New York, 1979. This is an amazing little book that you can read in a few hours. Your writing style will never be the same afterwards. This $8 book is the best investment you can ever make.
• Bugs in Writing. Lyn Dupre', (2nd ed.) This book expands on Strunk&White. It has more examples, and was written by an author who edited numerous technical publications, many of which were in computer science.
• The Chicago Manual of Style, Univ. of Chicago Press. This is the bible for American academic style.
• A Handbok for Scholars by Mary Claire van Leunen; Alfred Knopf, Publisher.

Articles

• Academic Integrity and Ethics (J. Sterbenz, 2019)
• The Science of Scientific Writing, George D. Gopen and Judith A. Swan, In American Scientist, Vol. 78, No. 6 (Nov-Dec, 1990), pp. 550-558. This is a useful article that teaches scientists how to write single sentences and paragraphs.

Conference Guidelines

• Roy Levin and David D. Redell, An evaluation of the ninth SOSP submissions -or- How (and how not) to write a good systems paper ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review 17(3):35-40 (July, 1983).
• Alan Snyder, How to get your paper accepted at OOPSLA OOPSLA '91 Proceedings, pp. 359-363.
• Ralph Johnson et al, How to get a paper accepted at OOPSLA Panel at OOPSLA'93, pp 429-436.
• What kinds of papers does USENIX publish?
• Alan Jay Smith, The Task of the Referee, IEEE Computer 23(4):65-71 (April 1990).
• Why I gave your paper a Strong Reject