Resources for oral presentations and written reports

Oral presentations

• Simon Peyton Jones's How to give a good research talk (2004) almost makes it look easy and covers the essentials. He's brave enough to point you to a video of himself, giving the talk.
• Mark D. Hill's Oral Presentation Advice (1997) briefly describes how to give a good talk. It contains a summary of David Patterson's classic How to Give a Bad Talk (1983).
• Judith P. Rhodes et al.'s Scientifically Speaking: Tips for Preparing Scientific Talks and Using Visual Aids (2005) contains advice and observations on preparing and delivering a scientific talk. Its advice on poster presentations is also valuable, though you can skip it if you are not making a poster.
• Jeff Radell wrote a brief online tutorial on effective presentations (1999).
• The Science & Engineering Library has a learning center with equipment with which you can rehearse your presentation. Reserve a time slot by visiting the circulation desk in Boelter 8270.
• Caroline McCullen's Student Presentation Rubric (1997) is the sort of thing we use when evaluating your presentation.

Written reports

• Angela Laflen's Writing a Report (2001) describes how to write and organize a research report.
• David A. McMurrey's Online Technical Writing: Online Textbook (2006) contains many examples and much discussion of technical writing. For example, it has a chapter on recommendation and feasibility reports that contains several sample reports.
• Simon Peyton Jones's How to write a good research paper (2004) is a brief and pleasant talk about how to write papers.
• Barbara Gross Davis's Helping Students Write Better in All Courses (1993) gives succinct advice about how to teach writing. Invert the advice, and you can learn a lot about how to write.
• William Strunk, Jr.'s The Elements of Style (1918) is the classic style guide for American English writing. It excels at showing how to omit needless words.
• Proper citations are a hallmark of any solidly written report. Citation and Style Guides (2008) refers to several style guides; pick a style suitable for your report and use it consistently. Especially see its section "How to cite sources."
• The Instructions for Authors: USENIX '08 provide templates for computer science research papers. The USENIX templates use a two-column format with 10-point font for most of the text, on an 8½×11" page. LaTeX typically generates higher-quality output for technical papers, but there are also templates for FrameMaker, groff, and Microsoft Word. An example of the output format and an example student paper are available.
• The Cabrillo Tidepool Study's Scientific Report Rubric (1997) is the sort of thing we use when evaluating your report.