Resources for oral presentations and written reports

Oral presentations

• Simon Peyton Jones's Research skills (2011) has a section "How to give a good research talk" almost makes it look easy and covers the essentials. He's brave enough to point you to a video of himself, giving the talk.
• Michael Ernst's Giving a technical presentation (giving a talk) (2011) contains workable and up-to-date advice for giving computer science talks.
• 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.
• The Science and Engineering Library (SEL) 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

• Simon Peyton Jones's Research skills (2011) contains a brief and pleasant section about how to write a good research paper; it is a companion to the "How to give a good research talk" section cited above.
• Roy Levin and David D. Redell's An Evaluation of the Ninth SOSP Submissions –or– How (and How Not) to Write a Good Systems Paper (1983) points out common problems in technical papers, and gives suggestions for how to fix them.
• The UNC Writing Center's Scientific Reports (2011) describes how to write and organize a scientific research report.
• David A. McMurrey's Online Technical Writing (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.
• 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."
• For citations, please submit a working link to a freely-readable copy if available, and also submit a working link to a URL based on Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) if available, as shown in How to find a DOI and create permanent links to online articles. Here is an example using Vancouver system format (although you need not use this style, you should be consistent about your citation style):
  • Ko AJ, Abraham R, Beckwith L et al. The state of the art in end-user software engineering. ACM Comput Surv. 2011;43(3):21:1–21:44. doi:10.1145/1922649.1922658.
  The citation's title hyperlinks to a freely-readable resource <http://faculty.washington.edu/ajko/papers/Ko2011EndUserSoftwareEngineering.pdf>. Unfortunately, these versions are often ephemeral or are preliminary versions, so it's better to also include a DOI to the final, stable version even if it's not freely readable. The DOI reference in the above citation hyperlinks to <http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/1922649.1922658>. If your report uses an active format such as PDF or HTML, URLs should be clickable.
• The Requirements for USENIX ATC '12 Authors provides 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.