Guideline for Thesis Writing

Technische Informatik

Dipl.-Ing. Sascha Mertens, August.04

Guideline for Thesis Writing

Table of Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Content & Structure___________________________________________________ 1 Extent _____________________________________________________________ 1 Basics of good Structure _____________________________________________ 1 Parts of the Thesis __________________________________________________ 1 Introduction _____________________________________________________ 2 Theory __________________________________________________________ 2 Argumentation___________________________________________________ 2 Conclusion ______________________________________________________ 4 Style ________________________________________________________________ 5 Structure (formal) ___________________________________________________ 5 Styleguide _________________________________________________________ 6 Fonts ___________________________________________________________ 6 Font Size ________________________________________________________ 7 Page style _______________________________________________________ 7 Header and Footer ________________________________________________ 8 Line spacing _____________________________________________________ 8 Paragraphs ______________________________________________________ 8 Justification ______________________________________________________ 8 Emphasis ________________________________________________________ 9 Headings ________________________________________________________ 9 Spelling _________________________________________________________ 9 Foreign words and technical terms__________________________________ 9 Abbreviations ___________________________________________________ 10 Citations __________________________________________________________ 10 Bibliography ______________________________________________________ 11 Anhang _____________________________________________________________ 12 Example __________________________________________________________ 12 Literaturverzeichnis__________________________________________________ 15

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Guideline for Thesis Writing

Table of Contents

LIST OF FIGURES
Figure 1 Example for a document style as defined in thesis.dot ------------- 13 Figure 2 Example for the title -------------------------------------------------------- 14

LIST OF TABLES
Table 1 Styles in thesis.dot ------------------------------------------------------------ 12

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Guideline for Thesis WritingBibliography & Recommended Literature

C ONTENT & S TRUCTURE

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Guideline for Thesis WritingBibliography & Recommended Literature

The structure of your thesis text is highly dependent of the type of your work, so this chapter can only describe the very general structure of scientific documents.

Extent A Bachelor Thesis has about 30 to 40 pages, while a Master Thesis has 40 to 60 pages excluding title, tables of content/figures/tables and the appendix.

Structuring The most difficult part in writing a thesis text usually is the structure finding find out what is important and when it should be mentioned. Retaining a structure is not only important for the text but also for the general proceeding of your work. The headline of a section summarises the contents of all the subsections of this section Maintain a logical order There are no sections containing only one subsection Do not sub dive too much, 4 levels of headings are enough Headings are followed by text and not by another heading

Parts of the Thesis A thesis text usually contains the following parts (where a part may stretch over several chapters).

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Introduction Theory Argumentation Description of Development/Implementation (if done) Conclusion

Introduction The introduction specifies the problem or task of the thesis as well as the result that the thesis aims at. Therefore it presents the context of the system (could be historical, institutional etc) and makes a statement about the scientific importance of the topic. Introductions seldomly need more the 2 to 5 pages and should be comprehensible to readers with technical background who are not experts on the topic of the thesis. Theory The theory chapter presents existing approaches and other scientific contributions that are used or considered to be useful to solve the task. It should contain introductions into fields of science/engineering that are necessary to understand the applicant's approach. This is not always easy, as you have to decide on what you do expect as commonly known and what needs to be introduced. A discussion with your tutor is unavoidable on this matter. Argumentation The argumentation is the central part of your work. Here you make use of the theory which was presented in order to answer the question(s)/solve the task that is the topic of the thesis. In the argumentation you decide and legitimate your approach/solution, you can develop your own ideas and trace them back to existing theories. The style of the argumentation depends on the type of thesis.
Engineering oriented (including development of software or hardware)

If a thesis includes the development of some software or hardware the argumentation chapter has to contain the analysis and the development. Describe the approach (algorithm, technique etc) used to solve the given task and why you chose exactly that one. If you make use of certain existing concepts or techniques (described in the theory

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part), the argumentation chapter gives the chance to show how these concepts are used. If there has been an explicit test phase, than this has to be described as well. The test setup and the achieved results should be included. In most of the cases, a development process can be described in the steps requirement study, analysis, system development and implementation. Details of the implementation are usually not part of a thesis text and can be put in the appendix. Only if there are details that are vital part of the problem solution they should be mentioned. The source of a software never appears in this documents at all (apart from snippets, if you need them to explain certain things), it is delivered as source code on Floppy, CD or DVD together with the text. Check that your work at least contains Requirement study Analysis and system development (use modelling languages and graphical descriptions like UML, Ward & Mellor, NassiSchneidermann Diags etc) Interaction system outer world (e.g. context diagram, use cases, environmental model) Abstract description of the system (e.g. behavioural model, abstract class description, data dictionary) Basic algorithms/methods to solve the main problems Detailed description of the moduls and their interactions (e.g. behavioural model, class diagram, sequence diagram) Implementation prerequisites (e.g. implementation model, description of central classes/procedures/functions and their interfaces Manual (how to use your program/device)
Empirical Research Task

If the thesis is a research task where a question is treated by empirical means (e.g. measurements, simulation), the argumentation chapter describes the technique that was used. It must be stated why a certain technique was chosen and why it is preferable to any other. You should make clear, what aims you are aiming at and what kind of results you are expecting. Especially the method of interpreting the outcomes of your research (i.e. the measured values or those yielded by a simulation) should be presented.

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Guideline for Thesis WritingBibliography & Recommended Literature

Theoretical Research Task

For a work on a purely theoretical task (e.g. a proof, mathematical analysis), this chapter is even more vital than for the others as it somehow represents the thesis' work. Here you should lead from the basics (as described in the chapter on theory) to your result by giving arguments, proofs, mathematical derivations etc. It is important to point that your conclusion is sound and to prove why. If you include references to statements of other scientists do not forget that we do not do religion here not everything that somebody states is therefore correct, if the person is holding an academic title. Especially if you are working on the core of your argumentation, make sure that a referenced statement is sufficiently accepted by the scientific world. If it is not but you want to take it into account anyway, make clear why you think it is howere true. A typical setup for a theoretical text is to start with a hypothesis and makes use of argumentation and references to approve or disapprove of it. Conclusion The conclusion chapter summarises the results of your work. As a part of that, you have to clarify if this result (or a developed system) meets the requirements as stated in the introduction. If your results include some finding, the conclusion chapter can compare these with the results other scientists/engineers presented on the same topic. The whole text should be concluded with an outlook on how the work could be continued (Ideas for further developments or a better technique, unsolved problems).

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Guideline for Thesis WritingBibliography & Recommended Literature

S TYLE
First of all your thesis is a piece of text and should therefore meet some requirements that make a text legible and look good. Secondly it is a scientific paper, so it must be compliant to the rules of scientific writing. In the end it is the document that will (hopefully) get you a title so there are one or two things, that you university wants to have fulfilled. The following sections give a brief overview on how you can add style to your document and (formal) structure so it meets all these requirements.

Structure (formal) The formal structure is prescribed by the university, if not marked differently, the mentioned parts are mandatory.
Title

The first page contains the title (the thesis' topic), the name if the faculty/institute that tutors you, the name of your tutor and the date when you delivered your text. An example can be found in Figure 2 on page 14.
Abstract (optional)

An abstract is a very compressed summary of your work. In a thesis an abstract only makes sense if it is reasonably different from the introduction.
Table of Contents

The table of contents contains all section names for the first three levels including the according page numbers.
List of Figures (LoF, optional)

The LoF list all Figures used in the text including the according page numbers. If a figure is taken from an external source, the source is

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Guideline for Thesis WritingBibliography & Recommended Literature

mentioned in this list (if you do not use a LoF you have to state the source within the figures). Figures are either numbered consecutively throughout the whole text or in the form <chapter><number> where number starts with 1 for every new chapter.
List of Tables (LoT, optional)

The same as the List of Figures, only for all tables used.
Abbreviations (optional)

If you used a lot of abbreviations you should list them, sorted alphabetically and write out the word(s) which the abbreviation stands for. If necessary, explain the meaning in one short sentence. Common abbreviations (e.g. etc) do not need to be listed.
Main part

The thesis text, which contains all the parts as described in the proceeding section.
Appendix (optional)

The appendix can hold all the material that seems to be too important to be left out but not important enough to be put into the main part. This could be plans, code snippets, measurement results etc.
Bibliography

The bibliography lists all the sources for cites used in the text.

Styleguide The following hints on style should answer most of the questions on how to format your document. As we do not take you for a flock of sheep that just follows, we gave some explanations here and there. Most of them are based on legibility studies, i.d. the given suggestions (marked by a ) help to make your text more readable.

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Guideline for Thesis WritingBibliography & Recommended Literature

Fonts A document should only use two different fonts, usually one for the headings and another for all the rest. There is an ongoing row on whether people should use serif fonts or sans-serif fonts 1 ; depending on who you ask each of them are considered to be more readable than the other. Font Size Font Sizes between 10 pt and 12 pt are considered to be the most readable. The effective sizes can differ for different fonts. Page style The paper size for a thesis is DIN A 4. The thesis text should be formatted as one page - single side print. Everything else is more complicated and has not much advantages (for the tutor, and he is your judge). Good margins are a key to good readability and finding them by just trying is harder than you might think. Some rules for good margins are: Left and right margin are basically equal but on the left there is 1 cm added for the binding The upper margin is smaller than the lower one as to the human eye the centre of a page is located higher than the geometrical centre. Upper to lower margin can relate as 1 : 1.6 or 1 : 1.4 Only big margins are good margins (this usually stands in contradiction to the engineers urge to optimize, but....) cm x 23.7 cm) Hint: Settle for your margins when you start to write and do not change them anymore.
1Serifs

Text body Headings: Book Antiqua Tahoma Times New Roman Arial Garamond Verdana

Font size 12 pt

Margins 2.5 cm : 2.5 cm : 2.5 cm : 3.5 cm (= text body 16

are all the little hooks and noses at the letters.

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Guideline for Thesis WritingBibliography & Recommended Literature

Header and Footer Header and footer facilitate working on a document. Thus they contain useful information as page numbers, section names, author names etc. The best place for page numbers is in the footer on the right side as one can easily flip through the pages to find a certain page. The distance from the page border to the header/footer is set to half the size of the distance between page border and text body. The header contains the thesis' title or the actual section's name on the right hand side. The footer contains the page numbers, right justified.

Line spacing If the line spacing is too small, the lines interfere with each other, if they are too big, the eye has to orient itself after each line- An optimal line spacing is 20% to 30% of the font size, this spacing is inserted by most of the modern word processors automatically. That means if you stick to the standard line feed value of your word processor you are on the safe side. Paragraphs A new paragraph can be marked by a space before and/or indenting the next line. If you decide for space, do not use your Return key to insert empty paragraphs, they only confuse the document and your software. Every word processor allows to set the space before the paragraph, so make use of this feature. A good space is between 75% and 100% of the font size Justification The readability of fully justified text and left aligned text is nearly equal given that the spacing between the words is good enough; a fully justified text with a lot of varying word spacing is most likely to remain unread. As the quality of the word spacing depends on the quality of hyphenation, left justification might be the more foolproof approach. Use 9 pt 12 pt space before each paragraph. Line spacing should be single line.

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Guideline for Thesis WritingBibliography & Recommended Literature

Emphasis

Align your text left justified and use hyphenation

There are three common ways of emphasising to ext that will make every professional wince in pain: bold letters, CAPITALS and underlines. Bold letters and Capitals stick out too much from the text and interfere with the headings, thus breaking the flow of reading. Underlines are even worse, since they break up the whole picture. Underlines were introduced in times when people only had typewriters and they had no other choice..... Emphasise by using Italic style; use bold face only, if you intend to structure something that you cannot structure with headings.

Headings Headings should lead through the text as well as make it easy to find passages. Thus they must be easy to distinguish, short and striking. The easiest way to completely confuse a reader is to use a thousand style feature for headings (look what my software can do). The more effective way is space. A lot of space. Before. And after. Use a font family (Serif Sans Serif) different from the body text, make the headings bold and give every level of heading a different size and your document looks good, things are easy to find and everybody is happy. If you want to by stylish, give the headings (or some of them) a negative indent. If you still do not have enough, try out what you like, but always ask yourself, if the headings are still leading through your document or if they have become confusing. For fonts see in the font section Heading 1: 26 pt, page break before, 12 pt after Heading 2: 16 pt, 32 pt before, 12 pt after Heading 3: 14 pt, 28 pt before, 12 pt after Heading 4: 12 pt, 24 pt before, 12 pt after

Spelling Of course the spelling has to be correct. Be aware that there are different types of English (e.g. American English, British English etc) and you have to stick to one of them.

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Guideline for Thesis WritingBibliography & Recommended Literature

Foreign words and technical terms If you want people to admire your document, use a lot of foreign wordes, latin or greek phrases and technical terms. If you simply want to be understood, simply write down what you have to say. In most cases, things can be expressed in common and plain words, you should use foreign words/technical terms only if something can be said with a (foreign) word that otherwise would need to be described at length there is a totally common technical term for what you are just writing about Nearly needless to say: make sure you use foreign words correctly. Abbreviations Do not use to many abbreviations, they prevent a fluent reading. Exceptions are widely used, common abbreviations (auch as e.g.) and technical abbreviations that are completely common to the target group of the text.

Citations Citations are used to support your statements and you argumentation. Direct citations or quotas are passages copied unchanged from other authors and have to be set in quotation marks. Indirect citations are descriptions of other peoples' thoughts in your own words. In both cases you must refer to the source of the passage. You do that by a reference to the bibliography. If your bibliography is numbered, you simply add the according number in brackets after the quotation. Without numeration, use the author's name and the publishing date to identify the source. In both cases you might add the page number where you found the passage. Mentioning the page numbers is not that common with engineers, but your choice depends on how important cites are for your text. Only make sure that you always do it the same way. Never forget to mark a citation, as this will be interpreted as an attempt of cheating. Examples for citations: Auge und Bewusstsein verlangen [...] gegliederte Eindrcke,... (Jegensdorf 1980, S. 72).

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Guideline for Thesis WritingBibliography & Recommended Literature

Fr die ...Konstruktion [...] zur geometrischen Bestimmung des Verhltnisses von Format, Textsatz und freie Flche (= Satzspiegel) ... ([7], S. 57) benutze Gutenberg folgende Vorschriften. The Simple Network Management Protocol consists of the following command (Douglas 2000)... McGhie states in [5] that Winword's default settings are only fit for users on knee-cap level

Bibliography The bibliography contains a complete list of all referenced source (books, journals, websites). It is sorted alphabetically by the authors' names and contains the titles of the source, the publisher and the year of publication.

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Guideline for Thesis WritingBibliography & Recommended Literature

A PPENDIX
Examples Table 1 shows the styles as they are defined in the file thesis.dot.
Table 1 Styles in thesis.dot Margins Left,Right,Top Bottom Gutter (binding) Text body Headings Body Heading 1 Heading 2 Heading 3 Heading 4 Header/Footer Captions Table body Line Spacing before Paragraph before Heading after Heading Lists Header Footer before Caption Left 2,5 cm, 3,5 cm, 1 cm Book Antiqua Tahoma 12 pt 20 pt 16 pt 14 pt 12 pt 10 pt 10 pt 10 pt Single 12 pt Size of Heading 12 pt 3 pt (before and after) 1,25 cm 1,75 cm 12 pt

Fonts Font Sizes

Spacing

Text alignment

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Guideline for Thesis WritingBibliography & Recommended Literature

Figure 1 Example of a document style as defined in thesis.dot

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Guideline for Thesis WritingBibliography & Recommended Literature

Figure 2 Example of the title sheet

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Guideline for Thesis WritingBibliography & Recommended Literature

B IBLIOGRAPHY & R ECOMMENDED L ITERATURE

[1] Beaufort Wijnholdsde, Aernout: Using Type: The Typographer's Craftsmanship and the Ergonomist's Research, http://www.plainlanguagenetwork.org/type/utbo213.htm, June 2004 Bill, Max: Gestaltung und Design Tour http://www.typolis.de/version1/schnel12.htm, June 2004 Camarda, Bill: Special Edition: Using Microsoft Word 2000, Que Cooperation, 1999 Jegensdorf, Lothar: Schriftgestaltung und Textanordnung, Otto Maier Verlag, 1980 Kurzidim, Michael: Schreiben ohne Frust, in c't magazin fr computertechnik, Ausgabe 7, 22.3.2004 McGhie, John: Creating a Template,
http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/Customization/CreateATemplatePart2.htm, Jan.

[2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

2004 [7] [8] [9] Meister, Cindy; McGhie, John; Jamieson, Peter: Microsoft Word Das ProfiBuch, Microsoft Press Deutschland, 2003 Rehe, Rolf F.: Typographie: Wege zur besseren Lesbarkeit, Verlag Coating, St. Gallen, 1974 Roth, Werner: Kurzer Leitfaden zur Gestaltung von Seminar, Studien- und Diplomarbeiten,
http://iug.unipaderborn.de/WieSeStuDiVor/kurztexte/Gestaltung/gestaltung.html, Jan. 2004

[10] Sagebiel-Dittrich, Bettina: Merkblatt zur Erstellung von wissenschaftlichen Arbeiten, http://www.betina-sagebiel.de/, Nov. 2002 [11] Weber, Jean Hollis, Taming OpenOffice.org Writer 1.1, WeberWoman's Wrevenge, October 2003

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