CSci 8551 Fall 2017: Writing resources

Writing Resources

A Guide to Grammar and Writing. This is an excellent site, which includes interactive exercises, and a lot of other useful information.
You can find the original 1918 edition of the classical book The Elements of Style by William Strunk, Jr. on line.
Writing Guidelines for Engineering and Science Students has guidelines on different types of writing.
Technical Writing for Computer Scientists by Mihir Bellare.
Advice on Research and Writing includes references to many sites that have useful information on writing.
For some humor on commonly used research phrases and their definitions, look at A Dictionary of Useful Research Phrases

Typesetting your papers: information on LaTeX.

Get up to speed quickly on Latex.
- Create a free account at https://www.sharelatex.com/. Click on New Project. If you chose Blank Project you will be given the skeleton of a latex document, ready to be filled. If you click om Example project you'll be given a sample document with some text, an image, and a bibliography. Modify the text to be what you want and look at how citations are done. To understand how to write bib entries read Bibliographies with BibTeX. It seems a lot but it is easy. Many sites will provide references in bib format.
  An alternative, which is very similar, is to use instead www.overleaf.com.
- You can take a systematic approach to learning latex by reading the easy to follow tutorials Absolute beginners, Document Structure, and Bibliographies with BibTeX.
A good complete introduction in a single document to the entire Latex is The not so Short Introduction to LaTeX2e Or LaTeX2e in 95 minutes by Tobias Oetiker. (PDF file).
Visit TUG, the T_EX Users Group site. Here you can get documentation here and visit the pages of different packages.
Look at Getting Started with TeX, LaTeX and Friends for information on installation and documentation.
CTAN, the Comprehensive T_EX Archive Network, is the home of all packages, tools, and documentation.
TeX Live is a good distribution for Unix/Linux and Windows. It is the one used in the Department.
MiKTEX is another good distribution for Windows. Recommended for Windows is proTeXt a MiKTeX-based distribution for Windows.

Typesetting your papers: basic LaTeX instructions.

To get started with Latex, create a file, let's call it myfile.tex, that countains the following:

\documentclass[11pt]{article}  % 11 points is a good size
\usepackage{fullpage}          % more lines and longer lines per page
\begin{document}
\title{Whatever}
\author{your name}
\maketitle                     % generates the title
.....  whatever you want to write.  To divide into sections use something like
\section{Introduction}
\section{Background}
....
\section{Conclusions}
\end{document}

To generate the output run

latex myfile

To preview the output use

xdvi myfile

Repeat this until you are satisfied. To generate the postscript file do

dvips -tletter myfile -o myfile.ps

Convert to pdf by doing

ps2pdf myfile.ps

You can easily generate bibliographic citations, by creating a bibliography file (.bib), specifying in your document what style you want, for instance

\bibliographystyle{plain}

and the name of your bibliography file

\bibliography{mybibliofile}

and running

bibtex myfile

After running bibtex, you need to run latex again twice (latex goes through your file once, so forward references cannot be filled in a single pass).