Philip Chan
242 Engineering Complex, x7280

Office Hours: MW 1-3pm (or by appointment)
Course WWW Page: http://www.cs.fit.edu/~pkc/classes/writing/

This course focuses on how to write research papers scientifically at the level suitable for submission to refereed CS research conferences and journals. The audience of research papers is researchers in the corresponding research areas. The same level of writing is expected in theses and dissertations. The course is developed based on evaluation criteria commonly used by publications in CS and experience with papers written by students.

Students will be involved in analyzing writing samples as well as writing their own. The course takes a "bottom-up" approach: starting from explaining technical ideas clearly and precisely, then constructing and stating arguments of why the ideas are original and significant, and finally organizing the components of the paper coherently. The course will mostly consist of case studies, complemented with some writing guidelines/rules.

This course is NOT about writing specification/design documents or user manuals for computer software/hardware, which is generally known as "technical writing."

Audience

This course assumes basic writing skills and does not cover grammar, diction, style, and other language issues. It also assumes knowledge of, or ability of learning on your own, how to use word processing software. Naturally, it assumes proficiency in general CS concepts.

The course is open to CS students who are conducting research and writing about their research. This includes all PhD students; MS and BS students will need a note (email) to the instructor from a CS faculty member stating that you are conducting research and writing research papers or theses in CS. Additionally, BS students will need to satisfy Florida Tech's (GPA) requirements for taking a graduate course.

Topics

• describing ideas in mathematics and pseudocode
• stating problem statements / hypotheses
• constructing evaluation / arguments
• discussing motivation and citing references: Citing References: APA style
• organization, abstract, title, ...
• logistics of submitting to conferences and journals
• thesis/dissertation organization and strategy

Recommended Books

• Writing for Computer Science. Justin Zobel. Second Edition, Springer, 2004. (directtextbook.com, amazon.com)
• The Elements of Style. William Strunk, Jr. 4th Edition, Pearson, 2000. (directtextbook.com, amazon.com)
  [very useful and inexpensive little book on general English writing]

• Weekly writing assignments (around 1 page each)
• Weekly analyses of writing samples
• Two mini-papers (around 3-5 pages each)

Evaluation

• 50% from instructor
• 50% from peer students

Resources

• CutePDF Writer (generating PDF files)
• Document conversion service at CERN