How to write an academic paper?

 There are many different subproblems available in scholarly writing. The pipeline contains of:

1. article writing itself

2. converting the article into the pdf format

3. publishing the pdf file

The following blog posts investigates only the first problem and assumes that the remaining one are easy to solve. The article writing itself is the result of taking notes.. Taking notes are done with an outliner software. An outliner works quite different from normal desktop publishing software.

Before a text can be written some keypoints are needed. The keypoints are creating during the reading of existing literature. If the keypoints are available in the outline editor it is possible to write down the same information as a prose text. Prose text is equal to normal sentences which can be read by the audience. The interesting fact is, that outline editors allows to write down full paragraphs. It is some sort of raw manuscript. These sentences are full of spelling mistakes and grammar errors. In most cases they are hard to read. but they are providing a first draft edition of a text.

In the next step the draft version is copied into a new file which is mostly a text processing software like LaTeX or MS-Word. Here is the idea to rewrite the sentences and make them easier to read. Also figures are added to the text and the bilographic references are inserted. From a formal perspective, a text is a reformulated version of the notes. The user has learnted something while reading the text from other. Has written down the information in keypoints and then he has reformulated the content with his own words.

The reason why this is done by authors is because it helps to understand a subject. Most texts are written not by experts but by newbies how have discovered a topic the first time. It is some sort of paradox, that especially authors without any background knowledge are motivated to explain the subject to a larger audience. The reason is, that with this precondition the author is motivated by himself. That means, it makes sense for him to investigate a topic and write something about it.

In theory it is possible to copy and paste the keypointes which were created during the research for a topic. But most authors are trying to avoid it. Because they are assuming that self-created keypoints are containing contradicting information and out of context knowledge. The more elegant way is to rewrite the content from scratch in prose text.