An okay discussion, but it falls entirely flat on its face in a very important place: related work.

What is the point of related work? Notionally twofold: to argue that there are people that care about what you're doing (because they're asking similar questions), and to argue that people haven't done the work yet.

But in reality there's a third reason: to help tell the story.

Writing a paper is telling a story. The story of an interesting problem, and how you went about solving it.

Simon thinks that related work should go at the end of the paper. Reading his slides makes it clear to me that really the issue is that he doesn't know what to do with related work; it seems to be an anachronism to him that he has to put somewhere so it might as well stick it at the end where no one will notice. He also seems to have missed that related work helps answer the "It's an interesting problem" and "It's an unsolved problem" sections of his story -- both of which he's got thrown up in the "Conveying the idea" slide. This tells me that he's likely not written a good related work section.

Related work is motivation. It's part of the story. It should be relatively up front. The story should go like this:

- Introduction: Here is a problem

- Related Work: Other people have gone after this problem and have failed to figure it out, or danced around it. People care about it.

- Approach: Here is how I solve the problem

- Details: Here is what I did

- Discussion: Here is what the results were

- Conclusions and Further Work: Here's what I'm going to do next.

John Cochrane (economist) has some excellent tips on writing for PhD students:

http://faculty.chicagobooth.edu/john.cochrane/research/Paper...

They should require every first year graduate student to read this or something similar. The ratio of well to poorly written papers is far too low.

Non-Flash GView version: http://docs.google.com/gview?url=http://research.microsoft.c...

One of those rare sets of slides that are both readable and highly informative as well as pleasing to the eye.