Expectations

The thesis should:

• Demonstrate your understanding in your own words. Plagiarism is unacceptable.
• Be correct.
• Be written for your audience: professors in the department who are not experts in this area. You should keep your audience in mind when deciding how much background material to include, how much context to provide, and your use of field-specific terminology, notation, etc.
• Not be a textbook. Only include background definitions and discussion that are necessary to understand your results.
• Demonstrate high-quality scientific writing (see Best Practices)
• Cite references appropriately
• Be an appropriate length. Your thesis should be between 20 and 50 pages (starting from the first chapter), excluding figures, appendices, and bibliography (this will vary based on your topic -- consult with your advisor).

Plagiarism Is Unacceptable

The thesis should be in your own words. Prior results must be cited. Additionally, any material taken from a source, whether verbatim or paraphrased, must include a citation. If you copy text word for word you must use quotation marks to indicate that it is not your own writing. However, it is relatively rare to use quotations in scientific writing, so please do this sparingly.

You should also determine your own structure at the paragraph level. A paraphrasing that mimics point by point the sentences in a source is not acceptable. For the expository parts of your thesis, we suggest gathering the information and then expressing the ideas in your own words.

Best Practices for High-Quality Scientific Writing

Good scientific writing is good writing and everything you have learned in other classes still applies. Some points of particular emphasis for scientific writing:

• You are telling a results-oriented story, not a time-oriented story: Structure your thesis in order to maximize clarity and impact, not based on what you did first, or what you spent the most time on. If you spent a lot of time on something but it is not relevant for your final results, leave it out or put it in an appendix.
• Great papers often have great figures. One way to write your thesis is to first create figures, and then write your story based on the figures.
• Avoid imprecise writing and "weasel words", see this advice
• Most CS papers have little to no direct quotations. Instead, rewrite in your own words.
• One of the best ways to get better at scientific writing is to critically read the scientific papers. See this guide to reading a CS research paper.
• This step-by-step guide helps you walk through the steps of writing a scientific article.

Writing FAQ

I vs We

Don’t say “We implemented ...” when it was just you. Instead say “I implemented ...”. It is fine to say “we” when it includes the reader: “We now examine ...”

Passive vs active voice

Technical writing typically uses active voice. That said, you will encounter different views on active vs. passive voice so make sure to find out the expectations of other faculty or the conventions in your subfield.

Tense

If you look at the sample text in the template, you will see the text is a combination of present and past depending on whether you are explaining something to the reader (present), or describing something you did (past). For example, you may write: "This thesis examines three questions. We first investigate..." Or: "I ran three experiments."

Ahh! LaTex! What?!

See the template for some commonly used techniques. Section B.4 of the template has some latex specific suggestions.