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Comment by rkangel | Hacker News Reader

He compares it to the "academic approach" of starting with background etc. But that's not what an academic paper actually starts with - it starts with an abstract that very briefly lays out the whole thing.

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Yup. And in CS papers, we are told to very early on (within the first 2 or 3 paragraphs, never later), to introduce our contribution. It may use some undefined terms and so on, but we should give the reader enough to go on. The "punchline" cannot be 3 pages in. Of course, the rest of the paper is to flesh out the details.

There's also the pragmatic advice given to most graduate students: read the abstract, then the conclusion, then the introduction, then the rest of the paper.

Funny, I usually find it best to jump from the abstract to the methodology. Or, maybe pass through the introduction in between if there's any word I do not understand.

The only papers I think the conclusion is more useful than the methodology are on the social sciences and software engineering.

If your job is to read the paper, sure, but if you're wondering whether it is even relevant to what you're looking for abstract is useful

Not in papers, but that is definitely the way a conversation goes when you're speaking with a typical researcher. Ask me how I know. Anyway, the abstract is sort of a metadata element, written precisely because the rest of the paper is not concise or succinct.

Yeah, that's true, a good abstract is usually similar to an executive summary, it's very short and easy to read.

And a good abstract, precisely, starts with the punch line. If anything, modern academic writing style is guilty of using overly whimsical and exaggerated titles and claims to grab attention.

Attention is all you need?

In some disciplines, at least, the background also follows a separate introduction that briefly explains the problem and the paper's contribution. This follows an explanation->conclusion order, but only explains enough to understand their contribution, before diving more deeply into prior work in the background.

Don't bore us; get to the chorus.

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