Planning for Success: Best Practices for Preparing your Paper or Thesis

Name): Ngo Thi Loan

Date: 30 (day) 3 (Month) 2023 (year)
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The lecture “Planning for Success: Best Practices for Preparing your Paper or Thesis”
was shared by Dr. Baron, an academic editor. From her presentation, we know how
to prepare our paper or thesis. There are six issues mentioned in her talk
1. Why is writing so hard.
2. Decide the direction of your paper, your target audience, and your target
journal.
3. Organizing your resources
4. Making and sticking to a schedule
5. Collaborating effectively
6. Creating a state of flow and avoiding writer’s block.

Herein, the most impressive part I learned from the talk is about the direction of
our paper. For this step, we first need to prepare a vision statement by expressing
our take-home message within two sentences and keeping it in mind throughout
the writing process. Then the key to success is preparation. We also need to plan
our time and create a deadline before starting. In the preparation stage, we need
to identify our paper’s purpose, our target audience, and our expected journal.
Then, we specify all the non-writing tasks that need to be completed such as
literature search, data analysis, producing figures and tables… Afterward, we
draft our manuscript, get feedback, revise, and revise until the final version. The
cover letter will be done before sending to the editor and submitting. In addition,
collaboration with our team is also imperative to fasten our paper and confirm
our hypothesis. Organizing and storing our data loss on a hard drive or cloud to
lessen the risk of data and corruption. During writing, turning off distractions
plays an essential role for keeping our flow.
This talk is really useful and guides us on how to write a good paper or a good thesis.
Thank you so much.