Format for writeups
All writeups should conform to the McGill standards for theses, with 1.5 line spacing
● TexStudio is a great editor
● Mendeley is a great way to post your articles online and export them to bibtex for your
writeups
● Figures must be located roughly near the section of text referencing them (i.e. not all
piled up at the end)
To keep the reader (me) in a good mood while reviewing your work, please ensure:
● Send rough drafts to supervisor for comments
● All symbols in all equations are defined
● Symbols are consistent throughout the thesis
● All statements are precise, quantitative, and justified
● All parts of all figures are referenced
● Figures are referenced in order
● Figure fonts are not too small to read
● A final spellcheck has been run
This might seem obvious, but experience proves a surprising number of students get many of
these points wrong, which takes all the fun out of learning about your work.
Please be completely clear / up front about concepts you do not understand! After all, a
major component of all research plans is to gain a deeper understanding of the relevant
concepts, and no one expects you to understand everything immediately. In particular, for
minireports, your “plan” can of course include to “finally figure out what that equation means.” I
will NOT dock points for admitting you do not understand something. If you try to fake it,
your writeup will necessarily be unclear, I will get grumpy, and that will result in docked points.
A good thesis can contain statements like “This is a complicated object, and I haven’t developed
much intuition beyond a, b, and c; however, ...” These statements are a queue to the reader that
it’s okay to be a little confused, and allows you to point out the important aspects without losing
them.
Grading for individual writeups
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50% science
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