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Seminar Survival
Guidelines
Writing Reports
and Making Presentations
Keep your audience
in mind
- A report or
presentation is almost never a single, standalone document or event.
Typically, it is part of a series of reports and presentations, e.g.,
in a seminar.
- Make sure that your
contribution fits into the line of contributions by others.
- Check at least the titles
of all contributions in the series.
- Get in contact with the
presenters or authors of the contributions that are topic- and time-wise
related to your contribution.
- Make references especially
in your presentation to past and future presentations of others. Check
beforehand with the speakers of future presentations that this reference
is actually meaningful.
- Adopt the depth of your
report or presentation to the knowledge of the audience
- Base the presentation
or report only on concepts that are known to the audience. This
is halfway easy at university where you should know well the knowledge
level of your fellow students pretty. In real life, the one who
invited, asked or paid you to do the report or presentation might
provide this information to you. Never ever do a report or presentation
without getting proper information about the audience beforehand.
- Never use abbreviations
without explaining them.
- It never hurts to shortly
re-capitulate basic concepts that are important for your presentation
though they should be known.
- On the other hand, the
report or presentation must mainly contain information that is new
to the audience.
- Challenge your audience.
A presentation for example should sufficiently interest the audience
to dig for further information like a report written by yourself
on the topic. A report may contain sections that require repeated
reading.
Content and Structure
- Finding Information
- The WWW is a tremendous
source of information, but it also has its risks. Due to its importance
for CS related topics, it is treated below as a separate item.
- Libraries are the most
classic way to find information. Though they have their limits concerning
most recent CS related topics, you should get acquainted with tracing
books based on topic search, getting them from your local library
or ordering them through remote loan, and with retrieving relevant
information from them without reading the complete book.
- Fellow students are
incredible information sources. The main challenge is that information
exchange is a game of give and take. It helps to engage in a study
group that does not focus on a single paper or course, but in a
group that is interested in learning about the crucial topics of
a major.
- From Data to Structure
- The first step to a
report or presentation is to collect the related information.
- The second step is to
find a suited structure of the data, typically in form of an outline
with the crucial headlines of the main sections.
- Keep your audience in
mind (see above) in doing so.
- It is important to keep
the big picture in mind, i.e., the worst mistake is to get lost
in irrelevant, minor technical details of the topic.
- On the other hand, the
presented information must be sufficiently substantiated, i.e.,
it should not be a shallow collection of marketing statements.
- The Actual Report or Presentation
- The hard part is finding
the right structure. Only start with the actual report or presentation
when you are sure about its structure (see above).
- Try to use images and
illustrations where ever possible.
- Do not be afraid of
your own opinion. But be sure that it is substantiated, i.e., based
on solid arguments.
- Do not overload slides
for a presentation. Each slide should contain some few, short statements.
Never ever literally read what is on the slide during your presentation.
- Make sure that you have
the proper timing for your presentation.
- Get a second opinion
or even better several additional opinions on your presentation
or report. Have your study group read the report and practice the
presentation in front of them.
Proper References
- Using a bibliography
- Any source for your
contribution must be properly listed. In case of doubt whether a
source is important, it is always better to be on the safe side
and to include it.
- For presentations, references
can be made as a footnote on the slide.
- For written reports,
a special section called "Bibliography" or "References"
at the end of the paper should be used to list the references.
- Make sure that you provide
as much information as possible to trace the source, namely at least
the author(s), the title, where the source was published, and when
the source was published.
- Especially when citing
a webpage, not only the URL of the source is of utmost importance,
but also the date when you got your information as webpages are
often updated and changed.
- There are standard formats
for the bibliography. Some basic introduction to the commonly used
APA style (APA = American Psychological Association) is located
at http://www.lib.monash.edu.au/tutorials/citing/apa.html
- Using keys
- A key is a kind of shortcut
to a reference in the bibliography.
- The two most important
versions of keys are numbers (e.g. [1] Alonso Adam, Bibi Blocksberg,
Joe Cool; The Art of Partying; Funny Books Publisher; 2001) and the
initials of the last names of the authors combined with the year of
appearance of a publication (e.g. [ABC01] Alonso Adam, Bibi Blocksberg,
Joe Cool; The Art of Partying; Funny Books Publisher; 2001).
- What to cite
- In general, any part
of your contribution that relies on external sources must be marked.
It is not sufficient to just list the sources in the bibliography.
- If you use some information
or idea from a source but state it in your own words, it is nevertheless
a must to cite the source. This can be done for example as follows:
Getting a good party going is according to [1] an artform.
- Any literal quote from
any source must be clearly marked by quotation marks. This can range
from a few words to a large paragraph. The source is typically listed
at the end of the quote, e.g., "blah blah blah blah party blah
blah blah blah blah blah " [1]. In any case, the source must
be clearly related to the quote.
- Images, illustrations, etc.
- For every image, illustration,
etc. that is not from yourself, the source from where the image is
taken has to be put below image, ideally as part of the caption.
- This reference typically
is in reports made in form of a key at the end of the caption pointing
to the source .
- In presentations this
reference typically is in form of a key that relates to a footnote
on the bottom of the slide.
- Acknowledgements
- If some people, institutions,
etc. contributed in some way to your report or presentation that
does not fit into the bibliography then it is appropriate to include
an acknowledgement section or slide at the end of your report or
presentation.
- This includes especially
fellow students or other people who significantly helped you.
Using information
from the Web
- Never ever trust information
from a webpage
- The WWW is an incredibly
useful, but also incredibly limited resource of information. On
the one hand, certain very up-to-date information, especially when
it come to CS related topics, is not available in well structured
form like in textbooks. The WWW is then the only easy to access
source. One the other hand, nobody guarantees or checks the correctness
or completeness of the content of websites.
- First of all, information
that is only found on a single site is not to be trusted.
- An indication for the
usefulness of a website is that it is cited by many others or that
many different authors contributed to the content of the website.
- Check the whether the information
is outdated
- This is halfway easy
if the website has a creation/update date
- otherwise use clues
like technological reference points to estimate the age, e.g., statements
like "today's 486 processor".
- As usual, neglect the
information in case of doubt.
- Citations and the Web
- In terms of the bibliography,
any information from the web has to be treated like any other source.
- This means that all
the rules from the "Proper References" part apply to webpages
with all their consequences.
Academic Conduct
and Proper Reports and Presentations
- Any violation of the above
rules is a severe academic misconduct.
- Breaking these rules
is a serious form of cheating.
- This especially holds
for copy&paste from sources without quotation marks and without
using a proper citation scheme with a in-place key referring to
a complete reference in the bibliography.
- This holds for "classic"
sources like journals and books as much as it holds for information
from the WWW, reports from other students, and so on.
- The risk of getting caught.
- First of all, you should
have sufficient self-esteem to obey to the above rules as much as
possible.
- Second, the risk of
getting caught is very high as there are meanwhile nice professional
services like www.turnitin.com that check student report's for academic
integrity.
- Third, the possible
bad consequences of cheating are in no comparison to what you can
gain with it.
- Learning by doing.
- Making mistakes is a
major part of learning. Hence, it is natural that you break some
of the above rules in the very early phase of your university education,
hopefully due to ignorance :).
- But with increasing
experiences, i.e., the latest from your second year on, it will
be expected from you that you are fully aware of the consequences
of such behavior.
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