BASIC TYPES OF

DOCUMENTS
Technical/research articles and
papers

Technical/research articles and

papers
The preparation of a scientific paper has
almost nothing to do with literary skill. It is
a question of organisation.
(Robert A. Day, How to Write and Publish a
Scientific Paper)

Technical/research articles and

papers

organized in the IMRAD format

Introduction, Methods, Results And
Discussion.

Introduction
presents the works and results of previously
published studies, moving from general to
specific information
answer the following questions: What is the
problem? Why is it interesting and
important? Why is it hard? Why hasn't it been
solved before? What are the key components
of my approach and results?
also include any specific limitations. In the
last part of the introduction, state objectives
and hypotheses
very important to cite sources

The Methods or Materials

presents in a narrative form the steps
taken in the experiment
the narrative should be clear enough for
another researcher to be able to duplicate
your work

Performance Experiments (measure

sensitivity to parameters, scalability,
showing absolute or relative performance
to previous approaches).

The Results
sets up notation and terminology, includes
algorithms, system descriptions, new
language constructs, analyses, etc.
It is important for the reader to understand
where the material is going.

Discussion
the author explains and interprets the
results obtained from the point of view of
other published results included in the
introduction, in relationship with the
objectives set and to the hypotheses
presents problems encountered in detail
Future Work (sets new directions) is also
included here

The Conclusions and The

Acknowledgements
The Conclusions (in general, a short
summarising paragraph of the entire
work).
The Acknowledgements

Bibliography and Citations

all citations needed in an alphabetical
order, complete and consistent
cite recent documents
Do not just copy randomly entries from
various lists or sites.
Do not include ISBN number; avoid long
URLs

Things to Avoid
too much motivational material
describing unnecessary and obvious
details.
spelling errors
arial and other sans-serif fonts.
three reasons are enough -- and they
should be described very briefly

Abstracts

as overviews of articles, accompanying

the articles
as summaries of Ph.D. theses or
dissertations, usually put in the
introduction
as components of larger reports, also
called executive summaries

Abstracts

between 200 and 500 words

descriptive or informative

Parts of the abstract

Motivation - briefly about the importance of your work,

the difficulty of the field and your works potential
impact
Problem statement - what exact problem you
approach and what sphere of application it has
Approach or methodology - what experimental
methods and approaches you used and what your
main findings are
Results - what solution resulted after the use of the
method
Major conclusions - to what extent your results are
general, or specific for a particular case.)

Grammar elements in abstracts

use of third person, passive, past tense and lack
of negatives
adjectives (if any) do not take superlatives
sentences avoid repetition and meaningless
expression
However, verb tenses vary with the nature of
information: statements about the content of the
document and about the findings are in the
present tense. Statements about the steps and
processes of the research are in past tense.

Grammar elements in abstracts

Verbs used in present/past simple, active voice:
the results show/establish/suggest or
showed/established/suggested
the main idea is that
the focus is on
shows/introduces/concludes/investigates/analyses/discu
sses
Verbs used in present/past simple passive voice:
it is proposed
it is identified
it is argued that

Examples
A multiprocessor scheduling scheme is presented for
supporting hierarchical containers that encapsulate
sporadic soft and hard real-time tasks. In this scheme,
each container is allocated a specified bandwidth,
which it uses to schedule its children. This scheme is
novel in that, with only soft real-time tasks, no utilization
loss is incurred when provisioning containers, even in
arbitrarily deep hierarchies. Presented experiments
show that the proposed scheme performs well
compared to conventional real-time scheduling
techniques that do not provide container isolation.

Examples
We have developed an automatic abstract generation
system for Japanese expository writings based on
rhetorical structure extraction. The system first extracts
the rhetorical structure, the compound of the rhetorical
relations between sentences, and then cuts out less
important parts in the extracted structure to generate an
abstract of the desired length. Evaluation of the
generated abstract showed that it contains at maximum
74% of the most important sentences of the original text.
The system is now utilized as a text browser for a
prototypical interactive document retrieval system.

The User Manual

to give assistance to people using a
particular system
how to assemble, how to use, how to fix a
system

The User Manual

tutorials, training manuals used as
textbooks, operators manuals, service
manuals, maintenance manuals for
semiskilled technicians, and repair
manuals for service technicians
performing extensive repairs

The User Manual

installation manuals, instruction manuals,
operations manuals (explaining how equipment
works in theory and practice and including
diagrams, blueprints, tables of operating data,
specifications), sales manuals (containing
product specifications, pricing and other
information for sales persons), system
documentation (showing how the system is
designed, what components it has) and
computer users manual

The User Manual

The sections of a user guide contain:
A cover page
A title page and copyright page
A preface (with details of related documents and
information on how to reach various aspects in the guide)
A contents page
A troubleshooting section (on errors and problems that
could occur and how to fix them)
A Frequently Asked Questions component
Where to find further help
A glossary and an index (in the case of very large
documents).

Technical reports
types of reports
periodic report
primary research
annual reports
progress reports
research reports
recommendation reports
feasibility reports
technical background reports

Tips for report writing

understand your objectives

keep it short, make clear and short
sentences, easy to be read by the busy
reader; be detailed and factual
organise the text, with
headings/subheadings to help the
readers find the information relevant
start with important information and add
additional information with scarcity

Tips
use a relaxed style, easy to read, rather
informal, but professional
use graphics, sources and data remembering
that people trust statistics more than opinions;
make your report attractive by sticking to the
same fonts (Times New Roman font at 11pt or
12pt), acceptable spacing (usually 1.5) and
wide margins as well as right justify.
number sections and subsections; Remember
that each section should be structured as
follows: Tell...

Specification (specs) sheet

cover a wide range of products and equipment, including
software
are written by engineers, technicians, programmers or
other technical specialists. According to Sheryl LindsellRoberts, (2001, p. 122), spec sheets are written in
teams, are always work-in-progress and need updating
as the project changes.
requirement specs include the detailed definition of the
application of the product, a list with functions and
capabilities, and an estimated cost as they mirror the
needs of the market for the product in question

Specs
functional specs -very detailed information of the
objectives, methods, system operation, output, file
descriptions, calculations, dealing with the capabilities
mentioned in the requirement specs
design specs - all documents relevant for the application
or product, interfaces and functions, programming
issues, reliability, diagnostic issues, and alterations in
progress
test specs add documents related to similar products or
applications, testing methods and warnings for the tester
end-user specs give information about operating the
product or running the application, including features,
weaknesses, other characteristics of the products,
information on the vendor