Writing
Resources for writing a project report, thesis, journal article or proposal, and for making a scientific poster poster.
One important resource that applies to all writing is "Durfee's Writing Rules."
Another important resource that applies to all writing is the Federal Plain Language Guidelines.
WRITING A JOURNAL ARTICLE
See How to write a journal article which describes the basics.
Also, see section below on writing literature reviews and the section on writing reports.
CHARTS AND FIGURES
Resource page on making charts and figures
SCIENTIFIC POSTERS
Resource page on how to make and present a scientific poster
SCIENTIFIC TALKS
Giving Science Talks, Colin Purrington, Swarthmore. (*Excellent*, a must read)
Use the assertion-evidence approach when making slides.
How to communicate your project to a lay audience. (5 excellent tips)
WRITING LITERATURE REVIEWS
A literature review is a comprehensive summary of the relevant academic journal articles and other research and technology in a defined field. Lit reviews are essential parts of all theses and honors reports. A concise lit review is required for all manuscripts submitted to scholarly journals.
Use this resource page on how to write a literature review
WRITING REPORTS
When writing a technical report or a Plan B project, follow the style guide used for ASME journal technical reports. Explained on the ASME JournalTool site. Follow the link for Guidelines then Writing a Technical Paper or Brief. Look at any ASME journal for examples, for example the Journal of Biomechanical Engineering or the Journal of Medical Devices. Or, follow IEEE style.
Using appropriate terms when writing about people with disabilities (very important!). Tips from 1st Health Insurance (particularly useful and has a nice list of references at the end)
How to write a thesis (coming)
How to write a project brief (coming)
Guidelines for documenting a project
An excellent resource for general standards of scientific writing, including handling citations
http://abacus.bates.edu/~ganderso/biology/resources/writing/HTWtoc.html
Other Resources
Writing Science Papers, Colin Purrington, Swarthmore.
Academic Phrasebank. Phrases for every situation.
ENGINEERING NOTEBOOKS
Purchasing an engineering design notebook. (Guidance on what type of notebook to buy)
Maintaining a Laboratory Notebook, Colin Purrington, Swarthmore. (*Excellent. A must read.*)
Engineering Design Notebook, Course ME 2011, University of Minnesota.
THESIS PROPOSALS
How to write a thesis proposal.
ENGINEERING LITERATURE
Finding your way around engineering literature. A study from the UMN library about what sources engineering students cite in their reports, theses and journal articles. Includes a description of each.
CITATIONS
Handling sources and citations in a report or presentation (very important!)
Citing Sources. A QuickStudy tutorial from the UMN Library. Includes tutorial on APA style and beginning and advanced tutorials on RefWorks.
More resources from the UMN Student Writing Support (link).
From
http://abacus.bates.edu/~ganderso/biology/resources/writing/HTWtoc.html :
Throughout the body of your paper (primarily the Intro and Discussion), whenever you refer to outside sources of information, you must cite the sources from which you drew information. The simplest way to do this is to parenthetically give the author's last name and the year of publication, e.g., (Clarke 2001). When citing information from another's publication, be sure to report the relevant aspects of the work clearly and succinctly, IN YOUR OWN WORDS. Provide a reference to the work as soon as possible after giving the information.
Some tips from Professor Dave Thomas at the U:
"Basically, whenever you make a statement of fact, ask yourself, Is this a well-known fact (e.g., heart disease is a serious health problem), or did I get it from some other source (e.g., heart disease killed 430,000 people last year in America ). If the answer is the latter, you have to say where you got the info. This is not so much to prevent plagiarism, but to establish that there is some authority (besides your personal opinion) for what you are asserting. If you got the fact from lecture notes in a class or elsewhere, say so. Or cite a textbook or journal article. It's OK to reproduce a figure from an article, but make sure you give a citation in the figure caption, e.g., (reproduced from Columbus et al. (1492)). (But if you want to PUBLISH a reproduced figure, you should also ask the author and publisher for permission.)"
CITATION MANAGERS
A citation manager is a computer-based tool that removes all of the headache and confusion surrounding the citation process. The citation manager serves two functions: first, a place to gather and store journal, book and web citations, and second, a means to insert cites and automatically generate a reference list in a specified format. You should always use a citation manager because doing it the old-fashioned way by hand is far too cumbersome and far too error-prone. For an overview of citation managers, see the Wikipedia entry and the UMN Libraries entry.
There are a large number of citation managers to choose among, some commercial, some free. For a comparison see the Wikipedia entry.
The recommended managers are Zotero (relatively new, open-source, free) and EndNote (powerful, EndNote Web version free for UMN affiliates). The UMN Library has a resource page on citation managers including comparisons and tutorials. .
If you don't know which to use, try Zotero, starting here for the intro.
If you use LaTex, then BibTeX is your citation manager. However, consider using another manager, such as Zotero, to gather your citations and then exporting to BibTeX format. The reason is that Zotero is much better at the gathering task.The UMN library has a pointer to a page that describes how to use BibTeX and Zotero together.
Resources From the UMN Library (recommended)
Intro to citation managers, and Zotero guides
https://www.lib.umn.edu/services/cm
Using Zotero with Google Docs
https://www.zotero.org/support/google_docs
WRITING WITH LaTeX
For writing complex reports and journal manuscripts, LaTeX is recommended.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaTeX
https://www.overleaf.com/learn
Overleaf is the recommended online LaTeX engine
WRITING WITH MATHEMATICS
For writing equations and for referring to equations in the body, follow IEEE style. Or look at the style used in your favorite engineering textbook. Pay attention to whether "Eq. 9 " or "Equation 9 " or just (9) is used. Look closely at where periods are in a sentence that contains an equations. Avoid using "as in the following," "as shown below" and similar phrases. Also, look at the APA style guide.
WRITING WITH FIGURES
For figure caption style and for how to refer to a figure in the body, follow IEEE style. Or look at the style used in your favorite engineering textbook. Pay attention to whether "Fig." or "Figure" is used and whether there are parentheses.
REPORTING STATISTICS
Resources for writing a results section that includes statistical analysis. Also see the APA style guide.