This guide describes how to explain your research in a persuasive, well-organized paper, avoiding plagiarism, tips to improve your academic English writing

1. Academic Writing Engineering
Tarek Gaber
Suez Canal University, Egypt
University of Salford, UK
SRGE, Egypt
Slides of the Invited Talk at the SRGE (http://egyptscience.net/) Workshop on Academic Writing Skills
Venue: Zoon Online
Writing a Successful Paper
(Academic Writing Engineering)
27 March 2021

2. • This guide describes how to explain your
research in a persuasive, well-organized paper
Aim
2

3. • A research paper places your idea in context helping
readers to understand:
• why the study was undertaken,
• what others have done in this same area, and
• the important question (hypothesis) that you examined.
• Your paper allows you to convince the readers that
your conclusions and recommendations, backed by
your evidence, are sound.
Why We Publish?
3

4. Persuasive:
Someone or something that is persuasive is likely to
persuade a person to believe or do a particular
thing.
Convincing:
If you describe someone or something as convincing,
you mean that they make you believe that a particular
thing is true, correct, or genuine.
What is Persuasive and Convincing Writing?
4

5. • Your reviewers/readers are expecting a
specific Structure of your paper to be
convinced.
• They are expecting specific questions to be
answered as they read papers:
• Why is this work important (motivation/introduction)?
• What others have done in this same area (literature review)?
• How was it done (methods)?
• What were the results (results)?
• What do those results mean (discussion)?
Meeting Readers’ Expectations
5

6. Writing Engineering
6

7. Writing Process
7

8. Iterative Writing
8
• Writing the 1st draft, read
each section of your draft
to determine how well it
answers these questions.
• Next, revise the draft so
that it is clear, complete,
and concise.
• The abstract, which
appears first in publication,
should be written last, and
advice about it appears
after information on the
conclusion.

9. Iterative Process
9
Source: https://ericdrown.uneportfolio.org/

10. • A paper’s introduction is a form of formal
invitation to your readers by:
• providing background information necessary for
understanding your research.
• Th first few sentences should
• highlight the focus of your paper and
• engage the reader’s attention,
Introduction
10

11. Once the reader’s attention is engaged, the paper
introduction is usually structured to smoothly move from
• what is known about the topic to what is not known, and then to
• the specific question that your research is trying to answer.
As you write, include references to credible, peer-reviewed
sources to support your claims.
So, what are the main items which should be in an
introduction?
Introduction Cont.
11

12. • Your introduction should answer the following
questions:
• What question did you answer, or what problem did you solve?
• Why is this question or problem important?
• How have others answered this question or solved this problem in the
past? Why have these approaches been tried? To what extent are the
approaches adequate?
• What was your specific hypothesis (i.e., what did you expect to happen)?
• How did you test this hypothesis?
• What insights does your paper reveal (i.e., why is your specific approach
useful)?
• What is the structure of the rest of the paper?
Introduction Cont.
12

13. • This section aims to discuss and critically assess the
current state of the art in the area of your paper.
• This often leads to the problem statement.
• The literature review section should be connected to
the your main aim of the paper.
• The literature review section aims to answer:
• Do you present evidence that you know why you are doing this
piece of research?
• Do you have an idea of the larger picture?
State of the art or literature review
Academic Writing Engineering 13

14. • This section tells how you conducted your project.
• It should be detailed enough to guide someone who
wants to reproduce your study.
• The section aims to answer the following questions:
• Is the approach/method clearly described?
• Can you outline the steps or summarize the approach/method?
• Does the work address the problem stated earlier in the paper?
• Does the approach seem to require unreasonable amounts of human
guidance? Can the method be replicable?
• What other specific characteristics are worth noting for this study?
Methods ( proposed Algorithm/method)
Academic Writing Engineering 14

15. • Provide representative examples that illustrate trends or outcomes that are
important to your hypothesis or aim or research question.
• However, the focus, most of your time, should be on the analysis of the
results and what they reveal about the proposed method/algorithm you are
studying or proposing.
• Make your data readable and understandable in tables and graphs, using
colors, shading, or other means to highlight the points you plan to make.
• To capture the interest of “skimmers,” ensure that your figures highlight
your key findings and phrase the captions so that readers can follow your
argument.
• Use informative titles that enable a reader to make sense of the figure
without reading the paper’s text.
• In addition to employing informative captions, explain all your tables,
diagrams, and figures in the text.
Results / Discussion
Academic Writing Engineering 15

16. • The analysis of the results is the most important part of your paper
because it presents your original work and explains its significance.
• Your analysis confirms or denies your study’s basic hypothesis,
• Your interpretation of your numerical results is very important as it
demonstrates how they answer the questions you set out in the
introduction or how well you have achieved your objectives.
• The analysis must support your conclusions.
Results / Discussion Cont.
Academic Writing Engineering 16

17. Try to think about what your reader wants to know about your results. Here are some
questions to guide you:
• What, specifically, did you learn from doing this study (proposing a new algorithm or
improving an old one)?
• What do your results say about the problem or question you were investigating?
• Was your hypothesis confirmed or disproved?
• Are the results what you expected?
• If you obtained anomalies or other unexpected results, can you explain them? If not, how
could you set about in the future to identify what caused them?
• How do your results compare to past findings? Are they consistent? Different? Why?
• How would you respond to objections or questions that other researchers might have about
your methods, results, or interpretations?
Results / Discussion Cont.
Academic Writing Engineering 17

18. • The conclusion answers the readers’ question: “So what?”
• It should give your readers points to “take home” from your paper.
• It should state clearly what your results demonstrate about the
hypothesis you were testing in the paper.
• It should also generalize your findings, perhaps suggesting how
others can use them in future research.
• All generalizations should be supported by your data, however;
the discussion should have proved these points, so that when the
reader gets to the conclusion, the statements are logical and
seem self-evident.
• No new evidence should be introduced in the conclusion.
Conclusion
Academic Writing Engineering 18

19. • Readers should be able to read only the abstract and still understand your primary points. Your abstract
should briefly answer the following questions:
• What question did you answer or what problem did you solve?
• Why is testing a hypothesis about this question or problem important (why should your readers care about the
work you conducted)?
• What methods did you select? Why did you select these particular approaches?
• What results did you obtain?
• What is the significance of the results?
• Was your hypothesis confirmed?
• Are there any surprises or anomalies in the results and, if so, how might you explain them?
• What other interpretations might be considered?
Abstract (is very important for assessor)
Software Quality Management 19

20. What is the relation between the writing
process and plagiarism avoidance?
Writing process and plagiarism avoidance
20

21. • “the act of taking the writings of another person and passing them off
as ones own”.
• “It is an act of forgery, piracy, and fraud and is stated to be a serious
crime of academia”.
• It is “the use of others’ published and unpublished ideas or words (or
other intellectual property) without attribution or permission and
presenting them as new and original rather than derived from an
existing source.”
• “Plagiarism ranges from the unreferenced use of others’ published
and unpublished ideas including research grant applications to
submission under new authorship of a complex paper, sometimes in a
different language. It may occur at any stage of planning, research,
writing or publication; it applies to print and electronic versions.”
What is Plagiarism?
21
Dhammi, I. K., & Haq, R. U. (2016). What is plagiarism and how to avoid it?. Indian Journal of Orthopaedics, 50(6), 581.

22. Verbatim plagiarism: When one submits someone else's words verbatim in
his/her own name without even acknowledging him publically. Copy and
paste from a published article without referencing is a common form of
verbatim plagiarism. Most commonly, it is seen in introduction and
discussion part of manuscript
Mosaic plagiarism: In this type of plagiarism each word is not copied but it
involves mixing ones own words in someone else's ideas and opinions.
This is copying and pasting in patchy manner
Paraphrasing: If one rewrites any part/paragraph of manuscript in his/her own
words it is called paraphrasing. Paraphrasing is a restatement in your own
words, of someone else's ideas. Changing a few words of the original
sentences does not make it your writing. Just changing words cannot
make it the property of borrower; hence, this should be properly
referenced. If it is not referenced, it will amount to plagiarism
Forms of Plagiarism
Academic Writing Engineering 22
Dhammi, I. K., & Haq, R. U. (2016). What is plagiarism and how
to avoid it?. Indian Journal of Orthopaedics, 50(6), 581.

23. Self plagiarism: “Publication of one's own data that have already been
published is not acceptable since it distorts scientific record.” Self-
plagiarized publications do not contribute to scientific work; they just
increase the number of papers published without justification in
scientific research.
Duplicate publication: When an author submits identical or almost identical manuscript (same data, results, and
discussion) to two different journals,
Text recycling: If the author uses large portions of his/her own already published text in his/her new manuscript,
Cyber plagiarism: “Copying or downloading in part or in their entirety
articles or research papers and ideas from the internet and not giving
proper acknowledgement is unethical and falls in the range of cyber
plagiarism”
Forms of Plagiarism Cont.
Academic Writing Engineering 23
Dhammi, I. K., & Haq, R. U. (2016). What is plagiarism and how
to avoid it?. Indian Journal of Orthopaedics, 50(6), 581.

24. Writing process and plagiarism avoidance
24
Source: https://ericdrown.uneportfolio.org/

25. 1. Reading the literature
• This builds up your vocabulary
2. Critically summarize what you read
• This improve your writing and vocabulary too.
• Critical Writing Template (attached)
3. Use phrase bank https://www.phrasebank.manchester.ac.uk/
4. Peer review: review your colleagues papers
How I can improve my English writing?
Academic Writing Engineering 25

26. 1. https://ericdrown.uneportfolio.org/2020/08/14/academic-success-
the-transition-to-college/
2. Dhammi, I. K., & Haq, R. U. (2016). What is plagiarism and how
to avoid it?. Indian Journal of Orthopaedics, 50(6), 581.
3. A Guide to Writing a Successful Paper:
https://www.owlnet.rice.edu/~cainproj/courses/comp482/comp482PaperGuide_F
07.pdf
4. Amanda Stent, How to Read a Computer Science Research
Paper: https://people.cs.pitt.edu/~litman/courses/cs2710/papers/howtoreadacspaper.pdf
5. Academic Phrasebank
https://www.phrasebank.manchester.ac.uk/
References and Useful Resources
26

27. Thank You
Tarek Gaber
Suez Canal University, Egypt
University of Salford, UK
SRGE, Egypt
Email: tmgaber@gmail.com
Academic Writing Engineering 27