IofT 1910W: Fall 2006
Writing Help

Writing resources and where to find help

Try the Center for Writing. You can get help and feedback on your writings. The service is free. Take advantage of it! The only thing to remember is that you need to give them some time to read your writings.
Write right provides simple and concise instructions on how to structure a research paper.
Technical Writing for Computer Scientists by Mihir Bellare.
Advice on Research and Writing is a collection of references to many sites that have useful information on how to do research and how to write, publish, speak, etc.
For some humor on commonly used research phrases and their definitions, look at A Dictionary of Useful Research Phrases

Help with Grammar

A Guide to Grammar and Writing. This is an excellent site, which includes interactive exercises, and a lot of other useful information.
You can find the original 1918 edition of the classical book The Elements of Style by William Strunk, Jr. on line.
Guide to Grammar and Style by Jack Lynch includes advice on

Avoiding Plagiarism

There is a very good web site http://plagiarismtest.org/ that will help you understand if you are plagiarizing others work in your report. Take a look at it. The page for students has some very clear definitions.

Reading and Evaluating Papers

Simple tips for reading research papers http://www.cs.swarthmore.edu/~newhall/cs97/s00/ReadingAdvice.html
The Journal Citation Reports is a source of statistics to evaluate the scholarly quality of scientific journals from many disciplines and publishers.

Typesetting your papers with LaTeX

Tired of using Word? Do you want to learn how to create professional looking documents with beautiful equations that are typeset as in the best textbooks? Consider learning LaTeX.

Visit TUG, the T_EX Users Group site. Here you can get documentation here and visit the pages of different packages.
Look at the page "Getting Started with TeX and LaTeX". Specially useful for beginners are:
- A Simplified Introduction to LaTeX by Harvey J. Greenberg (PS file-1.1M)
- The not so Short Introduction to LaTeX2e Or LaTeX2e in 95 minutes by Tobias Oetiker. (PDF file).
- LaTeX: from quick and dirty to style and finesse by Prof Tony Roberts. It is short and basic and covers all you need to write a project report.
- Here is a set of basic latex instructions you'll need:
```
\documentclass[11pt]{article}  % 11 points is a good size
\usepackage{fullpage}          % more lines and longer lines per page
\begin{document}
\title{Whatever}
\author{your name}
\date{}	                       % avoids printing the date
\maketitle
.....  whatever you want to write.  To divide in sections use 
\section{title}
....
\end{document}
```
  On Unix, to generate the output run
```
latex myfile
```
  To preview the output use
```
xdvi myfile
```
  Once happy, use
```
dvips -Pcmz myfile.dvi -o myfile.ps
```
  to generate postscript. Convert to pdf by doing
```
ps2pdf myfile.ps
```
  You can easily generate bibliographic citations, by creating a bibliography file (.bib), specifying in your document what style you want, for instance
```
\bibliographystyle{plain}
```
  and the name of your bibliography file
```
\bibliography{mybibliofile}
```
  and running
```
bibtex myfile
```
  After running bibtex, you need to run latex again twice (latex goes through your file once, so forward references cannot be filled in a single pass).
MiKTEX The best T_EX and LaT_EX distribution for Windows. Look for a shareware editor called Win Edt which is very good. Recommended for anyone trying to learn Latex (lots of macros, and an integrated shell that allows compilation of Latex files from the editor). Additional useful tools are:
- Ghostscript Postscript processor (supports Windows), used to print .ps files or convert them to .pdf.
- GSview Postscript viewer (supports Windows).
CTAN, the Comprehensive T_EX Archive Network, is the home of all packages, tools, and documentation.