How We Learned to Write Better Research Papers

By Connor Wood @ 2025-04-10T14:25 (+2)

Earlier this year, a few of us got together — students, early-career researchers, and tech enthusiasts — with a shared goal: to get better at writing academic papers. Not necessarily to publish in Nature, but to stop feeling like every paper was a chaotic mess of half-baked ideas, citation confusion, and last-minute formatting disasters.

So we set up a “writing practice group.”
The idea was simple: we would focus on one small writing skill at a time, write short pieces around a specific question, and get quick feedback from peers and from AI tools.

The results were surprising.

Why Practice Academic Writing (Deliberately)?

Most of us had read dozens of research papers — and yet, writing one felt like fumbling in the dark. Structuring arguments, reviewing literature effectively, and explaining methods clearly are all skills, but no one had ever really taught us how to practice them.

Our goal wasn’t to churn out publishable articles every week. It was to develop a writing intuition — to recognize what makes a paragraph clear or confusing, a section too shallow or too dense, a flow too abrupt or too vague.

So we started treating academic writing like a skill that could be trained — like coding, sports, or music.

Our Writing Sprint Format

Each week, we’d pick one small writing challenge and go through this process:

  1. Choose a focused topic or question
    E.g., What makes an AI-generated paragraph feel “off”?
    Or, How can I write a literature review that doesn’t feel like filler?
  2. Write a short draft in 40–60 minutes
    We often used tools like Scifocus to generate outlines or jumpstart ideas (more on that below).
  3. Give each other feedback (quick & honest)
    Everyone gave 1–2 practical suggestions to improve each piece. No fluff, just what helped.
  4. Group reflection
    We shared what felt hard, what worked well, and how we’d revise next time.

This rhythm made writing feel less daunting — more like debugging a piece of code than delivering a final product.

A Few Habits That Actually Worked

Here are some specific habits that stuck with us and consistently improved our writing:

1. Start with a structure, not a sentence

Before writing, we sketched the logical flow of the argument — either on paper or using AI Outline Generator, which helped us visualize the typical structure:
Intro → Background → Gap → Method → Result → Implication.

Even if we didn’t follow it rigidly, having a scaffold made writing much faster and easier to revise.

2. Over-collect, then filter your sources

Instead of trying to find the “perfect” 5 sources while writing, we’d spend 15–20 minutes up front collecting 20+ potentially relevant papers. Then we’d scan abstracts, highlight key phrases, and choose what to keep.

Tools we used:

3. Make your argument “walk”

One method we practiced: after writing a paragraph, summarize it in one sentence. If you couldn’t, the logic was probably muddy. This helped us catch fluff and redundancy early.

Scifocus’s Essay Checker also helped here — flagging unclear transitions and paragraphs that didn’t align with the rest of the paper.

Want to Try This Yourself?

If you’re a student or early researcher who wants to build writing confidence, here’s what we’d suggest:

  1. Find 2–4 friends and form a weekly writing group
  2. Pick one question or skill to focus on each time
  3. Write short — 300–500 words is plenty
  4. Give clear, useful feedback — focus on clarity and logic
  5. Use tools like Scifocus or Connected Papers to save time and boost feedback quality

Most importantly: treat writing like a learnable process — not a mysterious art form reserved for “good writers.”

 

Final Thoughts

We didn’t become research rockstars overnight. But we did start writing faster, revising more clearly, and — maybe most importantly — feeling more in control of the process.

If writing papers currently feels overwhelming, you’re not alone. But it doesn’t have to stay that way.
Structure, feedback, iteration, and the right tools can go a long way.