Thesis Writing Guide/Writing

Before you write Authorship Gender neutral language While you write Pictures Never copy-paste a drawing that you could re-create. Always cite where you derived an image from. PDF > SVG > PNG https://www.drawio.com/doc/faq/svg-export-text-problems Captions Imagine you're curating a museum. Some poeple will only read the small sign beneath every picture and move on. Write short, descriptive captions that tell the viewers everything they need to know. Some readers will go "window-shopping", i.e. only view images, tables and their captions. Make sure your thesis is at least somewhat comprehensive with only those tools. Details can go into the fulltext, but the images and captions by themselves should be understandable already. In short: Give ~ 3 lines of short, pointient description of what is shown and what is noteworthy. Be descriptive, what is shown, and keep the "why" and "how" for the long-form text. Also: Table and Listing captions above, Figure and anything else below Readers read Tables and listings from top to bottom, just like text, so captions should be above. Figures and most other inserts work differently from text, so captions below. If you need space Usually, you don't need to worry about space in a bachelor/master/doctor thesis. If, however, you submit your work as a paper, or are otherwise restricted to a certain set of pages, here are a few hints for further cleanup: if the note says "note = {publisher: ...}" - you can replace it with "publisher = ..." a simple search & replace with note = {publisher: and publisher = { should do the trick most of the time, unless there is something like "number: ..." in between. If there are more than 4 authors, replace the 4th and all following with "others" author = {First, A and Second, B and Third, C and Fourth, D and Fifth, E and ...}becomesauthor = {First, A and Second, B and Third, C and others} Introduction Thesis Writing Guide/Chapter 1: Introduction Mandatory chapter, almost entirely derived from your assessment (see Thesis Writing Guide/Introduction#Formalize an assignment). Background Thesis Writing Guide/Chapter 2: Background Anything that could be interesting for this thesis guide. Even if it might not end up being used, it should be here. Related Work Thesis Writing Guide/Chapter 3: Related Work Approach Thesis Writing Guide/Chapter 4: Approach Implementation Thesis Writing Guide/Chapter 5: Implementation Evaluation Thesis Writing Guide/Chapter 6: Evaluation Results Thesis Writing Guide/Chapter 7: Results Discussion Thesis Writing Guide/Chapter 8: Discussion Future Work Thesis Writing Guide/Chapter 9: Future Work Conclusion Thesis Writing Guide/Chapter 10: Conclusion Lessons Learned: Writing Dear reader, this is your time to shine! Contribute your own lessons learned, add helpful hints and mistakes made so that others may learn from it. Just click "edit" and add your own subsection! Don't Procrastinate too long If you push writing too far to the end of your thesis, you won't remember anymore what you did in week one. Start writing your master thesis in the first days. Anything is much better than nothing! Scientific word choice is complicated Structuring your ideas and using scientific terms is hard. Especially if English isn't your first language, you may not find the right words, but even a native speaker will have to re-learn a lot of words. "Significantly better" has a completely different meaning in science, compared to everyday usage. In general: avoid adjectives, unless your citing them write what works for you, and ask your supervisor to give you feedback especially if you're missing a specific word, just mark BIG, BOLD AND RED AS TODO and just ask your supervisor You will be a much better writer after your thesis, and that's good - you're learning, that's what all of this is for. Take a walk Often times, you can fix a writes block just by going outside and walk around for 20 minutes. Go for a walk often, it'll pay of one way or the other. In fact, after you read this, fix what you're doing right and then take a walk, feel for yourself :) Think in headlines You know everything that's going on, readers don't. When you write, start big and easy to understand. Then go into the next level of detail, complete that. Then the next level. If you start on the highest detail level, nobody can follow and you will loose the reader immedieatly. Give them a bigger headline, a bigger picture first, then fill that in with more detail.