CS 669: Scholarship Skills

Mondays and Wednesdays, 2p - 3:15p, FAB 150

Lyn Dupré. Bugs in Writing. Addison Wesley, ISGM 0-201-60019-6.
(Some online notes are at http://www.ai.sri.com/~wilkins/dupre.html. )

Lynne Truss. Eats, Shoots & Leaves. Gotham, 2004. ISBN 1592400876.

Mark Zobel. Writing for Computer Science. Springer 1997. ISBN 9-813-08322-0.

Robert E. Berger. A Scientific Approach to Writing for Engineers and Scientists. Wiley | IEEE Press, 2014.

Henry Watson Fowler. The New Fowler's Modern English Usage, R.W. Burchfield (Editor), Oxford, 2000.

William Zinsser. On Writing Well. Harpercollins, 1994.

David A. McMurrey and Joanne Buckley. A Writer's Handbook for Engineers. Thompson, 2008.

Mary-Clair van Leunen, A Handbook for Scholars, 2nd Ed, Oxford University Press, 1992. Some online notes are at http://www.cse.uu.nl/docs/tandt/html/Scholars/.

Donald E. Knuth, Tracy Larrabee, and Paul M. Robers, Mathematical Writing. MAA Notes Number 14, The Mathematical Association of America, 1989.

William Strunk, Jr. and E. B. White. The Elements of Style. Allyn and Bacon, 1995. (You can find this text on the web.)

Nichoals Higham, Handbook of Writing for the Mathematical Sciences, SIAM, 1993.

Robert I. Berkman. Find It Fast. Harper Perennial, 1997.

Elizabeth Castro. HTML for the World Wide Web, 4th Ed.: Visual Quickstart Guide, Peachpit Press, 2000.

Gary Blake and Robert W. Bly, The Elements of Technical Writing, Macmillan, 1993.

Edward Tufte. The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, Graphics Press, 1983.

There will be both exercises and projects for the course. Exercises will typically be due the class period after they are assigned, and will be graded on a “check-off” basis.

Projects will typically take a week or more each, and will be graded with specific points. There will be seven projects during the course: (P1) an annotated bibliography, (P2) a 2-page (~600-word) summary of a research paper, (P4) a revision of the summary, (P3) a 5-minute presentation on the research paper, (P5) a 5-page (~1500-word) background paper on a technical topic, and (P6) a 15-minute presentation based on P5. Some presentations will be scheduled outside of normal class periods, but all students are requested to attend. All assignments are due at the beginning of class on the due date.

There will be no exams in the course. Your grade will depend on the exercises and course projects, roughly as follows.

Exercises 15%
P1: Annotated Bibliography 15%
P2: Revision of 1-page summary 10%
P3: 5-minute Presentation 10%
P4: five-page technical paper 15%
P5: Revise 5-page paper 20%
P6: 15-minute Presentation 15%

The PSU Student Code of Conduct http://www.pdx.edu/dos/codeofconduct will be enforced for this class. Students have the responsibility to be familiar with the code and to behave in accordance with the code.

Assignments should be completed independently, although you can and should ask others for feedback on what you write. Be extremely careful to avoid plagiarism in completing your exercises and projects. If you are cutting and pasting text from another document, you are probably plagiarizing, unless you are quoting the material and citing the source. Plagiarism can take other forms, such as paraphrasing, or offering the ideas of another person as your own.

If you have, or think you may have, a disability that may affect your work in this class and feel you need accommodations, contact the Disability Resource Center to schedule an appointment and initiate a conversation about reasonable accommodations. The DRC is located in 116 Smith Memorial Student Union, 503-725-4150, drc@pdx.edu, https://www.pdx.edu/drc.

** If you already have accommodations, please contact me to make sure that I have received a faculty notification letter and discuss your accommodations.

** Please be aware that the accessible tables or chairs in the room should remain available for students who find that standard classroom seating is not useable.