Report Writing

• Writing a Thesis
• Issues in Writing
• Thesis structure
• Abstract vs. conclusion
• Referencing & citation
citations
 Writing a Thesis/report
• The purpose of writing a research report is to
communicate your ideas to the research community
• Each report (thesis/report) must have a central idea,
With evidence to support it
– A re-usable insight, useful to the reader
– Figure out what your idea is
– Make certain that the reader is left in no doubt about the
idea or contribution
• Be 100% explicit:
• “The main idea of this report is....”
• “In this section we present the main contributions of
the report.”
– Many reports contain good ideas, but do not distil what
they are..
– The reader is interested in ideas, not artefacts
 Why Learn report Writing?
• It takes lots of practice, so why bother?
–Because it is one of the most valuable life-long skills
• Most Computer Science careers require writing:
–Research: proposals, research notes, literature surveys, report
reviews, conference papers, journal reports, theses
–Industry: code comments, documentation, reports, memos
• The purpose is communication not obfuscation
–Don’t obscure what you have to say.
–Good writing is effortless reading that makes readers read more.
• It is clear, precise and concise,
• uses short sentences and simple words.
• It keeps to the facts and is easy to read and to understand.
–Good writing doesn't come naturally, it's a skill we need to learn.
However, you can learn to write well using plain language
principles.
 How to begin Writing?
• Bottom-up
– Describe details and link them together
– Leads to unstructured mess
• Top-down
– Start with structure and flesh out
– Leads to shifting structure as you progress
• Bi-directional
– Start with some high level structure (top-down)
– Write notes as you do research (bottom-up)
– Then structure your thesis/report around a
message (top-down)
– Then fill in the structure with details (bottom-up)
 High-level Issues
• Your writing should have a message
– An argument for which your research provides
evidence and experimental results
– Message must be reflected in the title, abstract,
introduction, conclusion and body of your writing

• Aiming to be understood is not sufficient:

– Write so that you cannot be misunderstood
– Assume your audience is intelligent but:
(a) ignorant and
(b) given to misunderstanding
– State key ideas transparently, prominently and
frequently
 Key Elements of Technical Style
• Visual Structure: Give strong
visual structure to your report
using
– Chapters
– sections and sub-sections
– bullets
– italics

• Use diagrams (figures, graphs,

chart, and tables) in your
discussion:
– Find out how to draw pictures, and
use them in your discussion
– Can the reader understand the
report using the diagrams (and their
captions) alone?
 Viewpoint Usage
• Rule:
– Never use the 1st person singular (‘I’)

• Third person is preferred

– Not - “I found out when I ran pilot experiments that the initial
design suffered from my personal bias.”
– Rather, “On running pilot experiments it was found that the
initial design suffered from experimenter bias.”
– This sometimes necessitates passive voice (subject last)

• Use of 1st person plural (‘We’)

– Use where the sentence would otherwise become too
contorted
– Even if you are the only author
 Use the Active Voice
• The passive voice is “respectable” but it
DEADENS your writing. Better ‘Avoid’ the use
of passive. “One” =
you and
the reader
NO YES
It can be seen that... One can see that...
34 tests were run We ran 34 tests
“We” =
These properties were We wanted to retain the
thought desirable these properties authors
It might be thought that This might seem like a
this would be a type error type error
 Use Simple, Direct Language
NO YES
On an annual basis Yearly
Make an effort to realize Find out
The object under study was
The ball moved sideways
displaced horizontally
It could be considered that the
speed of storage reclamation The garbage collector was slow
left something to be desired

From the result of this study

???
one can surely note that…
 Tense Usage
• Present Simple & Present Perfect predominate in scientific
writing:
–The work exists now & is timely but may have started in the past
• Except:
–Use past tense to report results.
• “in our experiments we found that …”
–But use present tense to discuss them.
• “a simple explanation of these findings is that …”

Simple Continuous Perfect

Past explored was exploring had explored
Present explore/s is exploring has explored
Future will/shall will be exploring will have explored
explore
 Thesis Writing: Chapterization
• The chapterization differs from one research area to the other.
To begin with we can use the following structure:
• Abstract
• Introduction:
– Almost similar with research proposal
• Literature review: Extensive & coherent related Literature survey
– Includes discussion on conceptual and related works.
• Theory, Methods, Algorithms, Techniques
– Technical discussion (architecture, formulas, algorithms, ...)
• Implementation, Experimentation and discussion of Results
– Includes implementation issues, eexperimental Results, Discussion of
Result (Analyze performance, Interpretation & generalization/finding)
• Conclusion and Recommendation:
– Tie up with aims
• References/Bibliography
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 Abstract: structure
• Abstract is a brief highlights of the entire study, from beginning to
end so that whoever reads it should be attracted to read
– The abstract that appears at the beginning of the research report, not only
summarizes the significant aspects of the research report but also attracts
a reader into reading the full report
• Parts of an Abstract: Use the following checklist for writing abstract:
– Problem statement: What problem are you trying to solve? What is the
scope of your work (a generalized approach, or for a specific situation)?
– Approach: How did you go about solving or making progress on the
problem? Did you use analytic models, prototype , or analysis of field
data? What was the extent of your work? What important variables did
you control, ignore, or measure?
– Results: What's the result? Is the accuracy better than previous research?
By how much? Avoid open words like ‘very’, ‘small’, ‘significant’.
– Conclusions: What are the implications of your solution? Is it going to
change the research direction? Are your results general or specific to a
particular case?
• Basically write abstract last
 Conclusion
• The conclusion (the last chapter in your research report) provides
final parting impression about the strength & weakness of the study.
– In the conclusion you should present clearly in a nutshell the aims of your
thesis, its main content, your results, & the significance of your results.
• Possible parts of conclusion:
– Introduce problem statement and aim of the study
– Review (very briefly) the research methods and/or design employed.
– Discuss results and findings, with broader implications of those findings.
– Mention strength and weakness of the study, based on which we can offer
suggestions for future research directions.
• An abstract & a conclusion overlap to a certain extent; they both share
the feature of describing the main contents & results of a thesis.
– However, the nature of the conclusion is broader. One could describe any
optional solutions or approaches used, backed by explaining why you
chose the solutions & approaches.
– So the conclusion is an integral part of the research report (actually, the
ending portion of the report); whereas the abstract is a description of the
study that's taken out of the report so that readers can quickly peruse it &
see if the full report will be relevant to them.
 Citations
• Serve to:
– Acknowledge the work of others
– Direct the reader to additional sources of information
– Acknowledge conflicts with other results
– Provide support for the views expressed in the report
– Broadly, place a report within its scientific context, relating it to
the present state of the art

• Failing to give credit to others can kill your report

– If you imply that an idea is yours, and the reader knows it is
not, then either
(a)You don’t know that it’s an old idea (bad)
(b)You do know, but are pretending it’s yours (worse)
– Avoid statement with sure sign that either a reference is
needed or a supporting argument
 Referencing & Citation Styles
• Any Referencing style is set up to give the reader
immediate information about sources cited in the text.
–There are many Referencing Styles: Harvard, IEEE, ACM,
Vancouver, APA, Chicago, MLA.
–Choose one and apply it consistently.
• The IEEE is the major professional body and publisher in
the fields of computer science.
–In IEEE citations, the references should be numbered and appear
in the order they appear in the text.
–In the body of your text refer to the source of your information
by inserting consecutive numbers in square brackets at the end of
each segment of cited information—like this [1].
–You can also cite your reference in your text as follows: “As
Belachew [3] points out,..
 IEEE Referencing Style
• Book : Author(s). Book title. Location: Publishing company, year.
– E.g.: W.K. Chen. Linear Networks. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 2011.
• Book Chapters : Author(s). “Chapter title” in Book title, edition, volume.
Editors name, Ed. Publishing location: Publishing company, year, pp.
– E.g.: J.E. Belay. “Amharic Search engine,” in Information retrieval, 2nd ed., vol.
3. J. Peters, Ed. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2004, pp.15-67.
• Journal Articles: Author(s). “Title”. Journal name, vol., no., pp, date.
– E.g.: D.B. Payne and H.G. Gunhold. “Video Summarizer.” The International
Journal of Document Analysis, vol. 33, No. 4, pp. 56-99, Jan. 1998.
• Conference reports: Author(s). “Title.” Conference proceedings, year, pp.
– E.g.: G. Pevere. “Broadband technology,” in Proc. IOOC-ECOC, 2009, pp. 57-98.
• WWW: Author(s). “Title.” Internet: complete URL, date updated [date
accessed].
– E.g.: M. Duncan. “Image search.” Internet: http://www.iceengg.edu/aff.html,
Oct. 25, 2011 [Nov. 29, 2012].
• Theses: Author. “Title.” Degree level, school, location, year.
– E.g.: S. Mola. “Networking.” M.Sc. thesis, Addis Ababa University,
Ethiopia, 2010.
 Final Project (due date: ___)
• Research proposal writing:
– First, Select the domain area that interest you:
• Natural Language Processing: Tagger, Parser, Stemmer, Morphological
analyzer, …
• Intelligent System: KBS, DM, Integrating DM with KBS
• Multimedia retrieval: image, text, audio, video,…
• Speech processing: speech recognition, speech synthesis, Speech
Translation
• (Character, signature, face) Recognition
• (Writer, script, language & speaker) identification
• Document summarization, Document classification, Document
categorization, Information retrieval, Question and Answering, …
– Second, read as many related literature as possible to
understand the area and identify the gap that needs further
study. See also recommendation part of the article.
– Finally, write research proposal using the format we discussed
in class
 Remember The Research Lifecycle
Problem
Problem
Identified
Identified
Research
Research
Activities
Activities
Solution
Solution
Adopted
Adopted
• Research Activities:
– Literature Search (survey previous work)
– Do the Work (elaborate ideas and get results)
– Write Up (plan and write a draft)
• The publish or perish report mill: Research
careers seem to depend on quantity of
publications not quality
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 meshe84@yahoo.com;
meshe84@gmail.com;
• Assignments
– Presentation report: (PPT, Report in DOC/PDF,
major e-resources, PDF) -- Nov 16 – Nov 20
– Evaluation (thesis) Nov 25
– Research proposal: Dec 16
• Final exam Jan 01