I have been meaning to write some (at least one) blog for my website for quite some time now. Occasionally, I stumble across some really insightful realizations, but procrastination usually takes over and those insights never get to see the light of the day. So, this time, when I was pondering what to write upon, a natural question was ‘what is even the benefit of writing?’.

It turns out to be a happy coincidence that lately I have been involved in a lot of academic writing - papers, short papers, course project reports, etc. and I have realized that such academic writing actually helps in several ways. So this first blog post is dedicated to the ‘importance of academic writing’.

Below I am jotting down pointers that I feel make academic writing useful:

  • Clarity of thought: Writing down ideas clears the thought process. Spending time over things that otherwise seem daunting, streamlines the thought process. Things that seem overly-complicated become simpler and things that one might take lightly show their true colors.
  • Diverse Summarization: A lot of academic writing can be thought of as various lengths of pitches. (In reference to Computer Science Papers:) The Abstract section is like an elevator pitch, the Introduction section is like a lightning talk, the Evaluation (or Results) section can be thought of as an Impact script. Writing these gives us pointers on how to convey our idea to a wide variety of audiences by giving the right points for the right audience.
  • Highlight key points: I have realized that writing good academic papers is a lot about conveying the key points in the right manner. Parts of the project/ idea that took the most time might not be the key highlights of the project. Identifying the `challenging' parts from the `interesting' parts of a project is the key to effective impactful communication - whether written, visual, or verbal.