Term Paper Outline

From GSLISWiki

Here are some tips on constructing the draft of your term paper. You should try and get something together by Nov 15 at the latest. You do not have to follow the outline below exactly, but you should produce something that somehow addresses the questions in it. If you are comfortable with the idea, post your evolving draft on the Wiki, linked from your project outline. If not, email it to me. It need not be elegant, it should not be too long and of course you can change any of it as you go.

• Title
  • Hardest to do. Just make something up for now

• Introduction
  • Also too hard to do first. Instead:
  • In no more than 4 bullet points, what is this paper (currently) about?
  • What will the reader gain from bothering to read it

• The problem
  • What is the problem you are trying to address?
  • What are the questions you are trying to answer?

• Literature Review / Related work
  • who has done something similar before?
  • how is your approach better?
  • whose work have you built on to get to your solution?

• Approach
  • How are you going about addressing the problem?

• Results
  • what have you done so far?
  • what have you learned from it?
  • what is especially interesting or surprising? Why?

• Reflections on the methods you used
  • what worked especially well or poorly as compared to the claims of the advocates of those methods
  • can you account for why?
  • how will you apply rapid methods for the next iteration?

• Future work
  • based on what you have learned, what do/would you plan to do next, and why?
  • what would you advise another person (or indeed your future self) to do next in this area based on what you have learned so far, that would enable them to make most productive progress?

• Rapidity tricks
  • Write the following out - NOW - without thinking too hard
  • What do you already know?
  • What is the common knowledge or hunch about this topic (right or wrong)?
  • What do you expect to find, now before you get started?
  • List some things you could do - why would they be good
  • Give the idems in this list points:
    • For promise of power
    • For likely effort cost to do
  • Prioritize by doing the low-hanging fruit