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IRF Uppsala
Space Plasma Physics
Anders Eriksson
Publications
Cluster
...EFW
...Quicklook
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Rosetta
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Student project reports
Anders ErikssonSwedish Institute of Space Physics, Uppsala, and
Department of Physics and Astronomy, Uppsala University
The written report is an important part of your project: no project is of any use if not well reported, and the written report is what will remain when your and your supervisor's memories have faded, which unfortunately is likely to be a much quicker process than you may think. In addition, the project report is the only part of your work which future employers will see, and possibly one of the things they will care most about when they consider hiring you, as the ability to communicate your results is fundamental to almost all technical and scientific work, in industry as well as in academia. Here are some things I have learnt from 25 years of student project supervision.
Start writing immediately
The best way to make sure that your project will not finish on time is to plan like "first I will do the job, then I will write the report". Start writing your report on the day you start your project! In this way, it will also be much clearer what is important to do, as the logical structure of your work is seen most clearly in your report. And you keep focus on your report, which in most cases is the most important product of you project -- often the only product!Keep your readers in mind
Who are you writing for? Not mainly for your supervisor! You will show your report to prospective employers not so much for showing what you have done, but primarily to show them that you can document and describe your work in an understandable and attractive way. The best audience to have in mind is probably your fellow students (some of which, in the current system at Uppsala University, actually may scrutinize your report): if they can understand what you write, you have found the right level.Write a story!
Be sure that you know why you write every section in your report, and to tell this to the readers. At the start of the report, give a clear outline of the logical structure of the report: "first we do this in Chapter 1, which leads to the investigation of that in Chapter 2", etc. At the start of each chapter and section, tell what you will do here, and how it fits into the general picture. In this way, the reader will always know why something is there -- and you have to clarify for yourself as well, which sometimes can be a great help.Use a balanced style of writing
This is admittedly one of the tougher points: you need to navigate between several possible style problems. Use as direct and uncomplicated prose as possible without losing precision or going into the realm of spoken rather than written language. Be clear and to the point. If you like, you may possibly add a few poetical decorations in some places, preferably in the introductory and concluding sections, but be sure that you do not spread flowers around the bulk of the text. Write in active tense, but mostly use "we" rather than "I", as "we" includes the reader while "I" excludes her/him. I find the active "we show" to usually be much better than "it is shown", which takes all the nerve out of the text -- I know you can find the opposite advice in some places, but highest authority is on my line: check out "Wheeler's rules of writing" summarizing John Archibald Wheeler's advice for how to write good physics. He knew!Cross-references
Have a lot of cross-references. This is easy in LaTeX (which you should use, see below), and is a great help for the reader. Instead of "as shown earlier" write "as we showed in equation (18) on page 9", which in LaTeX will look something like "as we showed in equation~(\ref{eq:ohm}) on page~\pageref{eq:ohm}". It's easy, and great for the reader!Graphics
A lot of graphics is usually nice. However, all figures should be commented on in the text and have a role in your story. No free-floating figures unrelated to the text! And be sure to explain the diagrams in detail, in the text and in the caption. Reports usually include all the relvant figures presenting the data, but often lacks sketches and cartoons illustrating the ideas. When you describe principles and concepts, perhaps you can draw a figure illustrating them? Good graphics helps understanding immensely -- or why do you think the newspapers are keen on news graphics illustrating major news events?Lists and tables
Look for possibilities to use lists and tables: think "can what I just am writing be itemized or put in a table?" all the time. Whenever there is some kind of description of steps or events where each step is too short to merit an own subsection, a bulleted or numbered list, or sometimes even a table, is likely to be better than running text. Lists have the obvious graphical advantage of telling the reader that here there is a series of steps, and to show how many there are, thus bringing greater clarity to your text. And it helps you avoid list-like writing -- quite possibly the most boring kind of prose to be found -- in the flow of your main text. But use your judgement: just a collection of lists will not do either. I might have used a list for the three logical items "clear and to the point", "poetical decorations" and "active tense" in the section on balanced style above, but I thought the pace here was sufficiently high and the items less distinct that youre reading would in this case benefit more from a direct narrative. Perhaps you do not agree?Math is prose
Math is like ordinary writing: you can read it out loud, forming complete sentences. Hence, if an equation is last in a sentence, you should end it with a period, and use commas and colons and whatever as in any text. This is obvious in ordinary inline writing (like "Ohm's law is U = R I."), but should be used also when equations are on display as separate objects:"Ohm's law is
U = R I,
but we here use it on the form
I = U/R."
This can become somewhat ugly when your sentence leads up to a large system of equations, with several alternatives and the last line ending with "q = R g y, y > 0" or something like that. Try avoiding this by rewriting your text, and use your own judgement. No rule can ever cover all situations.