Guidelines on Organizing and Formulating Ideas for Papers or Dissertations

The following text is a condensation of various forms of advice that I have found useful for students and young researchers who need to formulate their initially fuzzy ideas in a clear format and structure, so that they can be elaborated into a scientific paper or a PhD thesis. It starts by explaining how you can organize your ideas in the form of an outline. It then discusses the standard structure of a scientific paper, while going into more depth about typical mistakes that beginning writers make when trying to formulate their ideas in a paper or thesis. It concludes with recommendations on how to make your text more interesting and memorable, so that others will not only be inclined to read it, but to remember the core ideas that you brought forwards. These guidelines were originally published around 2010 on the now defunct ecco.vub.ac.be website (link to archived version), together with other advice for researchers.