Tips for Writing Technical Papers one of the most concise tutorials that you can find.
Principles of Technical Writing (lecture form Université Catholique de Louvain)
~How to write a great research paper (older version for Comic Sans fans)~
[[Bad sentences]] - An ftsrg collection
How to write a good introduction:
The Introduction provides the first impression about the paper. A good structure recommended by Stanford InfoLab’s Jennifer Widom in her article about Tips for Writing Technical Papers:
Writing journal papers is a long process - it often requires months to prepare the experiments, draw the figures and write the paper. We gathered some tips to make the process a shade easier.
If it’s possible, start with a conference paper, gather some feedback and incorporate them to the paper. Many conferences invite some submissions to journals, which usually has multiple benefits: 1) you have to fiddle a bit less on stating your contributions w.r.t. the conference paper (“you need a 30% delta”) 2) the review process is usually a bit faster 3) you get a hard deadline, which helps in scheduling your work. However, some papers do not work well as conference papers, as the Dealing with rejection post says:
Some papers are simply not fit for the format of a conference, and may benefit from being published at a journal. This is certainly true for many theoretical model papers or literature surveys, which do not necessarily need (or lend themselves to) a public talk at a scientific event. Some papers are too complex or too long to be conveniently discussed at a conference, and instead require the back-and-forth of the journal review cycle, as well as the additional page allowances of a journal.
The review process for journal papers often include multiple iterations with the reviewers (major revision, minor revision, etc.). Hence, in many ways, your first journal paper submission is more of a “beta version” than what you submit to a conference. This means, that if you are short on time (or just want to get the process started), you do not have to be meticulous on all your figures and plots. During the review round, you will have the chance to improve the figures and you will probably have to re-run the performance experiments with the changes requested by the reviewers.
In addition to the previous point, also remember what Knuth et al. state in their excellent report “Mathematical writing”:
Journal articles should be polished and timeless. Conference papers can be a little rougher. Conference papers are appropriate for work that is “not yet ready for the archives.” Technical reports (usually distributed by an institution) are good for work that is not even ready for the general world but still should be written up.
textcolor command of the xcolor package. (I am not sure about listings, but you should prepare them so that they are readable in b/w print). Even if you do not pay colour prints, your figures and plots can use colours but you should check if they are readable in b/w.\paragraph{Something} vs. \paragraph{Something.})Use ISO-4 abbreviations for journal titles: