After two years in grad school, I was looking to finish, and not to win an award. I could imagine that PhD students are even more desperate after 4-6 years in school.

I second his part about the informal parts very, very much, even though I would call this 'informal part' examples and motivations. Tell us in simple examples what your definition means, what your algorithm does, how your consideration works in this simple example, even if the example might be borderline with wrongness and oversimplification. It helps a lot, even though it is hard to find good examples :)

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/simonpj/papers...

"It is important to understand, from the outset of the PhD, who your target audience is: it’s you. I remember hearing that, on average, 1.6 people will read your PhD thesis. I’m pretty sure that includes yourself, your spouse, your supervisor, your second supervisor and your examiner (yeah, that’s technically 5 people. If someone says they’ve read your thesis, they’re probably lying -- they read page 9). You have to accept, that no one in the world will want to wade through this document. Ever."

http://jamie.ideasasylum.com/2008/07/things-i-learnt-during-...

Scientists in the field will not read it because they are not interested in all of the details of the analysis. They are only interested in the result, which will be published in a four page paper that only broadly explains the methods of the analysis.

My mother will not read it because I won't be writing it for her. When she asks me what I did, I will explain it in a way that she can understand. If I'm lucky, some science journalist will write an article about it, and I can send her the link.

Write a separate paper for #2. Use contractions and exclamation points. Present related work in a framework that tells a good story instead of that catalogs the space. Skip correctness details and drill in on implementation specifics.

Something for both audiences will just be too long and boring for either.

This should serve as a reminder to all researchers and writers; write a good abstract

Abstracts not only help the informal reader understand the concept. They introduce the reader to the broad stroke of the research and greatly assist information workers in their discovery.

This kind of generalization is dumb. "No one will read your thesis". Is that a law of nature? Does that apply to Claude Shannon? His M.Sc. showed how to map Boolean logic to electric circuits. I mean, who would ever want to read such a thing, right? ;-)

OK, enough of the title. I am all for making research work available and accessible, just as long as the quality of the work is not sacrificed. Research will always be difficult. It can't be made easy by adopting a new writing style, but it can be made easier.

As for ground-breaking, they are only one year projects on average. No one can expect much more from it.

The author's main critique is the style of the thesis, but here I think he is incorrect. Research papers need to be concise and precise, and to do that they must use an agreed upon language and style. The proper place for a casual style is in a survey or popular article (re: advertisement).

I think another reason that one shouldn't expect their thesis to be read is that a M.Sc thesis is usually the first full publication of the author, while even a PhD thesis is too often the collation of the author's first publications. One simply does't have the practice necessary to write a great paper.

Also, it is good to remember that the audience of a thesis the review committee. It is not written as a dialog in the research community as a journal article or conference paper is. Most advisors will not push for style changes or expanded references because at that would engage a larger review.

So is reading hyperbole as logical fact. It's his thesis that needs to be accurate and unambiguous, not his blog entries.

I am merely saying that we should bring the best parts of fiction and storytelling to academic writing as I believe more people would be read it and gain inspiration / insight from it.

I think you are an exceptional person if you are reading more than 1 thesis.

Didn't mean to offend with the title, but I was hoping to elicit that kind of reaction. I have had this talk with a bunch of people at the University of Toronto and we all sort of agree.. but I am an extremist I guess.

If you are interested in Context Awareness and HCI then I will send you a copy when I am done ;)

See the second paragraph: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_Shannon

"Why most people won't read your thesis"

Your have an interesting anecdote but it is just that -- a special case. You might as well say that prayer works.

Given the ratio of ground breaking theses compared to all the rest that are it is safe to say that no one will read a given thesis. At least, the chances are effectively 0. The sad part is that even if it is a good thesis it still won't ever see the light of day.

Conference papers are limited to 6 pages or so. Authors need to cite the right papers to ensure they won't offend anyone. They need to revise prior work. They need to stick to the core of the idea and refer to 1000s of other papers. Theses have less editorial and political constraints, so they're much more enjoyable to read IMHO. And, fortunately, theses don't have that hideous double column format.

If I want to learn a new field, I don't read papers. I read theses.

That's an interesting idea and I think I will try it myself.

But still, I think the two of us are 'insane' :)

Write some useful code, open-source it, promote it with talks on conferences.

Noone wants your "research".