Research Readability

Overheard in the [email protected] mailing list, which usually keeps it pretty technical, but I thought this was a nice comment:

A poster’s paraphrase of a snippet from a lecture by Richard Hamming:

When you’re beginning a research project, the first thing you should do is to draft the first page of the report in which you present the final results. Then ask yourself: “If I saw that paper in a journal with somebody else’s name at the top, would I bother to read it?”

If the answer is no, look for another topic.