How To Write Up Problems
- All work for this course, including problem solutions and lab write ups, are intended to provide opportunity to practice professional communication habits. As such they are NOT
- simply a copy of the writing you did to solve the problem,
- first drafts,
- "what the teacher wants"
- They ARE a presentation of the problem, your thinking about how to solve it, and the steps to get to the solution. They have the following properties
- Problem solutions are self-documenting, stand-alone documents.
- They include the text of the problem, a summary of principles/concepts/tools employed, and the explicit steps used to reach the solution.
- They include authorship information and information about other collaborators and contributors.
- They include citation for materials produced by others
- Pages are numbered
- Computer generated documents usually include file name, date saved, date printed, etc.
- Digital documents have smart file names.
- They are almost always "copied over" or "re-written" after you have actually solved the problem.
- When we write out a sequence of mathematical equations we write them out explicitly and consistently using standard notation. We "line up our equals signs."
- We use paper and white space liberally.
page revision: 2, last edited: 29 Aug 2013 20:09