Writing advice

Writing a thesis or report is not easy. On these pages, you can find some advice that hopefully will help you to approach this task. In general, here are some things to consider:

• Avoid plagiarism (and other forms of fraud).
  
  • In most institutions, plagiarism is considered fraud
    This means that being caught committing plagiarism will result in strict punishment, up to and including being removed or even banned from the study programme.
  • Plagiarism is copying (e.g., text, tables, figures or graphs) without clearly identifying the copied part and the source.
  • Avoid plagiarism by ALWAYS CITING YOUR SOURCES WHEREVER YOU USE THEM.
• Check other theses
  Have a look through a few other theses of your institution (for the OU: here). This will help you get a feeling for what a thesis looks like at your institution.
• Know your audience and your goals
  Your writing is targeted towards a specific audience, and its primary purpose is to achieve the desired goal(s).
• Design your thesis
  When you write a program, you do not just begin to write. First you think and create a design. Do the same for a report, it will save you a lot of time!
• Structure, structure, structure
  Computer science is all about structuring information. In particular:
  • Use headers etc. to structure your thesis
  • Know the standard structure
• Specifics
  Some advice on research questions, figures and tables, references, and formulas.
• Finding literature
  Some advice on how to find related work quickly and efficiently.