- Class Meetings: Tuesday
/
Thursday 14:00-15:20 pm, OND Room 220
- Course Description:
The purpose of this course is to
make
you better
scholars. It will make you better writers,
better presenters, and better reviewers. It concentrates on your
reading,
writing and presentation skills. The course concentrates on both the
production
and consumption (including critique) of the “media” used by scholars to
communicate today.
You will learn to both read and write papers, such as conference and
journal
articles. You will learn to both listen to and prepare and present oral
presentations; and you will learn to construct web
resources. You will also learn skills that will prepare you for your
career
as a scholar including: structure and content of papers and theses; how
to be an effective reviewer of material written by others; how to
prepare
yourself for the job hunt in academia or industry when you graduate.
When
you’ve completed the course, you should have a feel for the tasks and
activities of modern scholars.
-
Required Texts:
Mark
Zobel. Writing for Computer Science.
Springer 1997. ISBN: 9813083220.
Lyn Dupré. BUGS in Writing: A
Guide to Debugging
Your Prose (2nd Edition). Addison-Wesley,1998. ISBN: 020137921X.
- Other Useful Books:
-
Mary-Claire van Leunen, A Handbook for Scholars, 2nd Ed., Oxford
University Press, 1992.
- William
Zinsser, On Writing Well, Harpercollins, 1994.
- William
Strunk, Jr. and E. B.
White, The Elements of Style, Allyn
and Bacon, 1995. (You can find this text on line.)
- Donald E.
Knuth, Tracy
Larrabee and Paul M. Robers, Mathematical
Writing, MAA Notes Number 14, The Mathematical Association of America, 1989.
- Nicholas
Higham, Handbook of Writing for the
Mathematical Sciences, SIAM,
1993.
- Elizabeth
Castro, HTML for the World Wide Web, 4th Ed.: Visual
Quickstart Guide, Peachpit Press, 2000.
- Gary Blake
and Robet W. Bly, The Elements of
Technical Writing, Macmillan, 1993.
- Henry
Watson Fowler. The New Fowler's Modern English Usage,
R. W. Burchfield (Editor), Oxford, 2000. (Any of
the older or newer editions will also be useful).
-
Assignments:
There will be both exercises and
projects for
the course.
Exercises will typically be due the class period after they are
assigned,
and will be graded on a “check-off” basis. Projects will typically take
a week or more each, and will be graded with specific points. There
will
be six projects during the course: an annotated bibliography, a 2-page
(~500-word) summary of a research paper, a revision of the summary, a
5-minute
presentation on the research paper, a 10-15-page (~5000-word)
background
paper on a technical topic (outline and 2 drafts) and a 15-minute
presentation
based on that paper. Presentations will be scheduled outside of normal
class periods, but all students are welcome to attend.
All assignments are due at the beginning of class on the due
date.
Assignments should be completed independently, although you can
ask
others for feedback on what you write. Be extremely careful to avoid
plagiarism
in completing your exercises and projects. If you are cutting and
pasting
text from another document, you are probably plagiarizing, unless you
are
quoting the material and citing the source. Plagiarism can take other
forms,
such as paraphrasing, or offering the ideas of another person as your
own.
There will be no exams in the course. Your grade will depend your
the
scores on the assignments, as follows.
- Grading: There will be no exams in the course. Rather, the
grade
will depend mainly on the scores on course projects.
| Project |
Value |
| Exercises |
10% |
| Annotated Bibliography |
15% |
| 2 Page Summary |
15% |
| Revision of 2-page summary |
10% |
| 5 Minute Presentation |
10% |
| Background paper |
25% |
| 15 minute Presentation |
15% |