WRITING YOUR RESEARCH PROPOSAL
Scientific writing is an art that takes time to master. Here are a few key issues that should be useful when writing a PhD or M.Sc. proposal, tuned for the type of research in our lab.
אמ;לק
1. הכי חשוב, לכתוב ראשון: פרק המטרות. The goals.
לדוקטורט: עמוד אחד, שלוש-ארבע מטרות, כל אחת בהיקף של מאמר אחד גדול. שלושתם ביחד מכסים תחום רחב מכמה כיוונים. בדרך כלל, המטרה הראשונה היא מאמר שכבר פרסמת.
2. פרק השיטה. תאור מפורט יותר של הדרך שבה יושגו המטרות (איזה ארכיטקטורות, איזה נתונים, וכו).
3. פרק תוצאות ראשוניות, פשוט לשים את התוצאות של המאמר שפרסמתם.
4. פרק הרקע. לכתוב אחרון. לא לתאר דברים בסיסיים, הקורא של ההצעה יהיה פרופ מנוסה, לא צריך ללמד אותו מה זה רשתות נוירונים.
פרק רקע טוב אמור להשיג שלושה דברים:
(א) נותן מוטיבציה ברורה למה הבעיה שאותה תוקפים חשובה ומשמעותית.
(ב) שם את העבודה בקונטקסט של מה עשו עד עכשיו
(ג) מסביר למה הכיוון שבו הולכים הוא חדשני מצד אחד אבל פיזיבילי מצד שני.
1.1 Start from the end
The most efficient order for writing your proposal is to start with the goals. This is basically the hardest part that you need to spend time on: Deciding what you want to investigate. You should write 2-4 goals, each summarized as a single paragraph.
My suggestion is that your next step should be the preliminary results section. By the time your write your proposal, you probably already have some significant results.
The last part to write is the introduction. See the next point to understand why.
2. The introduction section should provide motivation, not background
The single goal of the introduction section is to make the reader feel that the research goals he is about to read next, are important and worth spending the effort. Sometimes, student mistake to think they should cover wide background to prove they know the field. This is often not necessary, and even hurting: a reviewer tries to understand what's novel in your proposal, they don't want to spend time on general background material.
3. Create excellent figures
See the section on visualization to understand why. In a proposal, which is often poorly read, this is important more than ever.
WRITING YOUR THESIS
TBD
DEFENDING YOUR THESIS
Congratulations! You submitted your thesis. Here are point to take into account when preparing your defense presentation.
For MSc, prepare a 20-30 minute presentation. 1-minute per slide.
Give context and motivation. Spend the first 1-2 slides explaining why the research is important.
Don't dwell too long on introduction. The faculty you present to probably knows most of it ;)
The goal of the intro is to pint our what you are doing differently than the standard approaches.
Use slide animation to keep the audience in sync with your voice. not for fun.
Balance text and images on each slide. As a rule of thumb, use 1~3 figures and 5~20 words on each slide.
WRITING TIPS FOR HEBREW SPEAKERS
Make the logical structure of your argument explicit:
Start sentences with opening words that clarify the logical relation to teh previous sentence.
"First,..." "Second,..."
"More specifically, ..." or "For example, ..."
"To test this hypothesis, ..."
English punctuation rules are not the same as in Hebrew!
dashes nd hyphens: Hyphens are aimed to help the parser in your head: learn at large scale but large-scale learning. practice hyphens here and dashes here
Remember a comma after opening words "First, ..."
Check this webpage to practice English rules you may not know.
Other tips: (1) which vs that (2) Serif and non-serif fonts. (3) Affect vs effect
See here for a list of resources to improve your English.