Morning Paper Assignment (2022w1)

Overview

Communication is a critical aspect of research. If you have brilliant discoveries, they will have no impact if you cannot communicate them effectively. Throughout this course, we will discuss communication, and I will try to provide extensive feedback on your writing -- my goal is that you learn both how to conduct systems research and describe that research effectively.

When we explain work in writing, we must always keep our audience in mind. The most common mistake I see in young researchers is writing for people that know exactly what the author knows. This exercise is designed to preemptively break that habit. The morning paper was a blog, produced by Adrian Colyer, for over six years. Each week, he wrote descriptions of three computer science papers, drawing on all areas of computer science. His writings were designed for those from all walks of life and assumed no a priori expertise. As such, one could read the morning paper to learn about all sorts of areas of computer science. I learned much from Adrian's writings and used to tell all my students to subscribe to the blog and read the articles, even if they never read the complete papers being discussed.

In this assignment, you will both write one 'morning paper'-style blog post and provide constructive feedback to a classmate on another. No two students may select the same paper, either for authoring or feedback. So the parts of this assignment are:

  1. By Monday, September 12: Select a paper for which you will write a blog post.
  2. By Wednesday, September 14: Select a paper for which you will provide feedback to the person who sined up to write a blog post for it (it must be one of those someone has signed up to write).
  3. Cognizant of the deadline below, write your blog post.
  4. Leave yourself enough time to a) give your evaluator 2 days to provide feedback and b) incorporate that feedback.
  5. At least two days before your paper will be discussed in class: submit (using the handin repository) a) your initial post, b) your partner's feedback, and c) your final post.
You will undoubtedly find it helpful to read or skim a couple of the real morning paper writeups before writing your own.

How to provide constructive feedback

When providing feedback to your peers, we will draw on a technique for writing workshops called Gotham Booth (bottom half of the page). Gotham Booth is designed for a setting in which many people provide feedback to a single author, but we will adopt the basic premises.

Grading

Your grade on this assignment will be based on three things: 1) your initial writeup, 2) how well you responded to the feedback you received, and 3) the quality of your feedback as a reviewer.

Should you choose a paper that Adrian happened to write up, you must make sure that you do not copy or mimic the existing write up in any way. Your work should be your interpretation of the work in your own words. Plagiarism applies to this assignment as it applies anywhere else.