Comments on the form and format of your written project report (of type
literature synthesis)
The main purpose of your oral presentation and your report is to provide
an overview and critical synthesis of developments in a particular area,
based on your readings of available literature. This overview and synthesis
should be interesting for your fellow students and any person who wants
to know more about this particular area and possibly study it in more details
(this is hypothetical). Since there is generally not enough time (nor enough
space in the report) to present all aspects of the area in detail, the
author has to select the most important issues for presentation, and I
suggest to select one particular topic among these issues to be explored
in more depth.
Since your report is based on your readings, it should also give references
to the sources of your information. Therefore I expect that
-
the report includes a list of references (as usual), also including all
relevant Web references.
-
the report contains an annex including an annotated bibliography which
includes a paragraph on each of the reading material which you went through
for the preparation of your talk, and which tells the reader what the main
point of the paper is and whether it was useful for your talk.
You are welcome to include figures and parts of text from the references
in your report. It is not necessary to invent new words if the ideas have
already been well expressed by other people. But it is important to give
credit to the sources. I will not give lower marks for your report if many
figures and many parts of the text are copied from various references (but
I will give lower marks if all references come from the same place; it
is important to make a synthesis from several sources). What counts for
getting a good mark is: - the text and figures in the report read well,
are well structured, provide interesting information, go deep enough into
the subject area, provide a critical synthesis of the subject area, etc.
(and maybe you have some interesting ideas of your own).
Therefore I expect that you indicate the source of each figure (e.g.
Figure 2: "General overview of xxx" [reference yy] or [adapted from reference
zz] or [new]). And each time you use some text (more than a sentence) from
some existing document, you should explicitely make a quote, for instance
in the following form:
... Now I will tell you about xxx. As explained in [reference xx],
"the xxx is build as follows: ... text from reference xx ... ". However,
we also have to consider that [reference yy] "the xxx may be used in ...
" which is very important in the context which we consider in this report.
...
Please consult the explanation and examples given in the pamphlet
"Beware of plagiarism"
(VERY USEFUL)
Last updated: September 20, 2000