Suggestions when writing your report
Suggestions when writing your report
- For students who are looking for examples of papers - For students who are looking for examples of papers - see the ACM Sigcomm proceedings Links to an external site..
- For your document, you should be sure to use A4-sized paper rather than US letter.
- For those using LaTeX, you can improve the look of the document by:
- switching to using PostScipt fonts (instructions) Links to an external site.
- You can also turn off hyphenation or at least limit its use with "\hyphenpenalty=5000 \tolerance=1000"
Some common flaws in reports (from other courses)
- Using the KTH logotype on your report or presentation is not permitted.
- Incomplete references
- Missing important citations
- Statements made without justification or supporting citations
- Poor (or no) editing
- Failure to spell check the document
- Documents which it is clear that no one looked at after formatting - often these have breaks in the middle of sentences, missing phrases, ... .
- Using figures from others without the copyright owner's permission
- Lack of page numbers
- Unreadable text in figures
- Failure to label elements of figures adequately
- Use of contractions - you should avoid using contractions in a formal report
- Use of acronyms or abbreviations without properly introducing them; often failure to use these acronyms and abbreviations consistently through the rest of the paper
- Redundant text
- Using too few references, often the paper looks like simply a cut and paste edit of these references.
- Single sentence paragraphs
- Lack of vertical white space between paragraphs, which in some cases makes it hard to understand where new paragraphs begin
- Lack of a date - every document should have a date, in addition to the title and author(s), and most references should have more information - keep in mind that the goal is to enable someone (perhaps even yourself) to find the reference at a later point in time
- Sections and subsections are not numbered - hiding both the structure of the document and making cross-references difficult