Revision, Revision, Revision: A Discussion with Sascha Fahl

Scholarly Communication

Listen to this interview of Sascha Fahl, Professor for Computer Science and Faculty for Usable Security and Privacy at CISPA, the Helmholtz Center for Information Security, in Saarbrücken, Germany. We talk about replicable methods, we talk about critical reading, and we talk about the necessity of a network to your research.

Sascha Fahl : "I myself practise — and I encourage my PhDs to practice it too — the zero-draft writing approach. This is the approach of writing early, writing often. Because it's just absolutely important to accept that what you initially write is not what's going to be submitted and definitely not what will be in the camera-ready version of the paper. So I encourage the researchers in my group to put text into a manuscript very early on and to write sections which can be written before the results are in. And then it's just about revising the text multiple times, as it grows and as the project advances. Because we want to make sure that the argumentation is good, that the research questions are good, that the results actually address the research questions, that the discussion really fits well together with the results, and all that stuff. So the approach I promote is write early, write often, and also revise a lot."

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