General guidelines on technical writing

1. The reader is the most important person. Reading a well-written and well-presented
report is a pleasure. Reading papers in the area of your project is a good way to
develop a good writing style.
2. Writing a dissertation is a time-consuming process. It is in your interests to make an
early start on it - do not wait until you have finished all the practical work before
starting writing.
3. Produce a draft for each chapter in turn and follow each up with a discussion with
your supervisor Material from your interim report should be integrated into the final
dissertation. Modifications will be made to it based on feedback from your supervisor,
but also, the deeper understanding you will have developed through your own
developments and analysis of your results means that you will be able to produce a
better-analysed literature survey (or other type of survey).
4. Plan your project time so that the supervisor has time to read drafts and make
comments, and you have time to act on your supervisor's comments.
5. Your supervisor is not a copy editor. They will comment on structure and content, but
will not correct a multitude of grammar and spelling mistakes. That is up to you. The
English Language Teaching Centre can offer assistance to overseas students on
dissertation writing.
6. Proof read your dissertation, then proof read it again. A spell checker alone is not
adequate.
7. Every chapter but the introduction and conclusions should have an introductory
section that sets the scene for the chapter, i.e. explains the reasoning behind the
chapter's structure.
8. Be very wary of using first person singular. Instead of writing "I wrote a program..."
consider "A program was written..." or rephrasing altogether.
9. The reader is probably a busy person. Padding irritates, so be concise.
10. It is important to make clear which parts of your work are original, and which parts
are taken from the literature.
11. Do not even think of passing off other people's writing as your own. Cutting and
pasting from another author's work is easy to detect. If you have any doubts about
the dividing line between a thorough literature review and plagiarism, then discuss it
with your supervisor. This holds for illustrations also - other people's illustrations that

you have scanned in or obtained from the web can only be used both with their
permission and with an appropriate reference where possible.
12. Where possible, all figures should be created using appropriate software tools.
13. If you use abbreviations or acronyms they should be expanded when first used, e.g.,
"TLA (Three Letter Abbreviation)" and if they are used throughout the dissertation, a
glossary should be provided as an appendix.

Formatting the paper

1. Report submitted shall be of A4 portrait, white paper, and hard bind with golden
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.

embossing.
Use Arial font.
Use 11 Arial fonts for the main text
Use 12 Arial Bold fonts for the heading.
Use 09 Arial for all labeling the photos, diagrams, source, table or image number.
All the images shall be titled with a numbering system like a diagram in chapter 3

(Fig no 3b: - Label) and also the source to be mentioned like (Source: - www..)
7. Use margins of 1 on Top, bottom and right side. 1.5 margin on the left side.
8. 1.5 line spacing throughout the paper.
9. Bibliography: - Books, Journals, Websites referred should be separately
mentioned
S No Author Name
a)

Year

Title

Watt, A. (2000) 3D Computer Graphics (third edition), London: AddisonWesley.

b)

Cooke, M.P. & Brown, G.J. (1999) Interactive explorations in speech and
hearing. Journal of the Acoustical Society of Japan, 20(2), pp. 89-97.