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 your citations to scholarly sources, please submit a working link to a URL based on Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs), as shown in How to find a DOI and create permanent links to online articles. Here is an example:
  • 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 DOI reference in the above citation hyperlinks to <http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/1922649.1922658>. For non-scholarly sources, use a URL that is as stable as possible.
• 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.