New Developments in PETS

Feedback on Seminar Papers

Written on 19.03.2024 11:19 by Wouter Lueks

Thanks all for submitting your seminar papers. You should now all have received an email with feedback about your first submission. In addition, we wanted to share some common errors that we saw across your submissions. Rather than writing them 10 times, we're listing them here. I've also posted a draft document in the material section with more extensive writing / LaTeX advice that provides extra advice and background for the things we're pointing out here. (I didn't prepare this document for this class, but would love to get feedback on things that are not clear.)

Now for the general feedback. When writing an English academic paper you should:

• Avoid the use of passive voice. So instead of saying "Method X was proposed by Blake et al." simply write "Blake et al. proposed X". Using active voice makes your writing more dynamic and easier to read. There are a lot of great online resources that will help you understand the nuances better.
• Avoid the use of unqualified references (such as "this", "that", "these"). While it is typically clear to you, as the writer, which of the many antecedents you are referring to, that might not be the case for the reader. It is better to qualify your reference. You could for example write "this method" or "this tree" to make it clear what you are referring to.
• In general you should use shorter sentences. In many cases your native language would permit you to write long sentences (for example, in French or German). In English this is much less common and requires a lot of skill to pull off. Fortunately, there is no need to write long and complicated sentences. Short and clear will help you get your ideas across much better.
• In academic English, you should avoid the use of contractions. So do not write "let's", "don't", "aren't", "it's" etc. Use the long form.
• If you are writing in American English, you should write "i.e.," and "e.g.," including the trailing comma. British English does not use these commas.

We also noticed a few LaTeX related quirks:

• In LaTeX, write your quotes like this:

  ``To be or not to be''

  (notice that the opening quotes are different from the closing quotes). The writing advice document in the materials section has more examples.
• When submitting papers for review, it is nicer to enable page numbers (e.g., for easier referencing). We forgot to tell you how to enable them. After \maketitle add

  \thispagestyle{plain}
  \pagestyle{plain}

• Your references should be sorted alphabetically by the name(s) of the authors. Not in order of appearance.
• When citing multiple papers in one go, use

  \cite{ref1,ref2,ref3}

  and make sure that you sort the references so that the numbers are in increasing order.

Finally for some specific content related advice:

• Some of the seminar papers refer to the 2 papers you read as "the first paper" or "the second paper". Please don't do this. Write your paper as if the readers are trying to learn about the topic, but were not part of the seminar.

Resubmitting your paper. All of your are free to resubmit a revised version of the paper. The normal deadline is Friday March 22. However, we'd be happy to extent the deadline to Wednesday March 27. But, you must ask for them, otherwise we'll grade what we have on Friday.