Introduction Outline

Requirements

The next milestone is an outline of your final report’s introduction section (while acknowledging it will change as you learn more and work on your project). You will create and submit this the same way as your proposals (as a link to a simple web-page on gradescope) except that you will work on this in groups.

The outline must include this information:

  • An (optionally revised) project name and project scope
  • A list of three to five group members
  • A five to ten sentence outline
    • You may follow Dr. Stirewalt’s guidelines for writing an introduction (see below), but it is not mandatory.
    • You should not “fill-in” each paragraph; you should only provide the first sentence of each paragraph.
    • You should explain your ideal/expected results for the “details” and “assessment” paragraphs.
  • An ethical sweep (see below)

You should think of this as an easy way to “build” your final write-up. Starting with the first sentence of each paragraph lets you focus on high-level details instead of the details.

In addition to the outline, you must create a Hypothesis group including me and all of your team members.

Here are the steps:

  1. All group members must create accounts on Hypothesis.
  2. One group member should create a new group and send the invite link to all other members.
  3. Submit the invite link on gradescope.

Advice

  • Your group should come to an agreement about your project. It does not need to closely resemble any of the proposed projects.

  • Likewise, you can certainly expect your outline to evolve as you work on your project throughout the semester.

Please utilize the Writing Program & Center For Speaking, Writing, and the Image!

Writing and Speaking Partners meet one-on-one with students to talk about their work and provide feedback at any stage of their preparation process. Trained to think deeply about written, oral, and visual rhetoric and communication, these student peers facilitate conversations about everything from ID1 papers to senior theses, lab reports to creative writing, giving presentations to developing strategies for reading and engaging more deeply and confidently in class discussion.

To make an appointment with a Writing or Speaking Partner, please visit the CSWIM scheduling website.

General Writing Advice

Some quick tips from me:

  • Clearly state your thesis.
  • Provide clear evidence supporting your thesis.
  • Write a bold beginning.
  • Write a provocative ending.
  • Vary sentence and paragraph length.
  • Check for sentence and paragraph transitions.
  • Maintain a consistent tense and voice.
  • Get into a writing routine. Write a small amount (20 to 30 minutes) three days a week for the entire semester.
  • Jot down disparate sentences and combine them together as is useful.
  • Outline sections headings and then write the first sentence of each paragraph for each section.
  • Use present tense.
  • Esthetics are important.
    • Use descending font sizes for headings, subheadings, etc.
    • Use bold, italics, underlining to draw attention to important points (use consistently).
    • Add figures and tables to summarize and break-up text.

Here are some tips from Some “Tips from a Pulitzer prizewinner” (US novelist Cormac McCarthy) written up by Van Savage and Pamela Yeh:

  • Use minimalism to achieve clarity.
  • Decide on your paper’s theme and two or three points you want every reader to remember.
  • Limit each paragraph to a single message.
  • Keep sentences short, simply constructed, and direct.
  • Don’t slow the reader down.
  • Don’t over-elaborate.
  • Don’t worry too much about reads who want to find a way to argue about every tangential point and list all possible qualifications for every statement.
  • Spoken language and common sense are generally better guides for a first draft than rule books.
  • Commas denote a pause in speaking.
  • Dashes should emphasize the clauses you consider most important—without using bold or italics—and not only for defining terms.
  • Inject questions and less-formal language to break up tone and maintain a friendly feeling.
  • Choose concrete language and examples.
  • Avoid placing equations in the middle of sentences.
  • Read your work aloud to yourself or a friend.

If you are using markdown, then you should take a look at this guide to the basic syntax. You’ll eventually want to include

Stirewalt’s 5-paragraph rule for writing Introductions

“Of the many tasks involved in writing a good conference paper, I find writing the introduction section to be the most difficult. This is unfortunate, as a poorly structured argument sets the wrong tone for what might otherwise be really good research.

To help manage this painful process, I have developed a heuristic, called the five-paragraph rule, that is useful for organizing introductions. The heuristic prescribes that good introductions should contain a sequence of five major pieces, each of which should fit into a single paragraph in order to force the writer to communicate at the appropriate level of abstraction.

The heuristic borrows ideas from persuasive argument and structured analysis/structured design (ala DeMarco/Yourdon), and it is reminiscent of a similar structuring mechanism from freshman level courses in English composition. My success in publishing papers increased dramatically once I began to use this heuristic to structure my introductions.”

 -- Dr. K. Stirewalt

The heuristic is: Design your introductions to comprise five paragraphs whose purpose and contents are as follows:

  1. Introductory paragraph: What is the problem and why is it relevant to the audience attending THIS CONFERENCE? Moreover, why is the problem hard, and what is your solution? You must be brief here. This forces you to boil down your contribution to its bare essence and communicate it directly.

  2. Background paragraph: Elaborate on why the problem is hard, critically examining prior work, trying to tease out one or two central shortcomings that your solution overcomes.

  3. Transition paragraph: What keen insight did you apply to overcome the shortcomings of other approaches? Structure this paragraph like a syllogism: Whereas \(P\) and \(P => Q\), infer \(Q\).

  4. Details paragraph: What technical challenges did you have to overcome and what kinds of validation did you perform?

  5. Assessment paragraph: Assess your results and briefly state the broadly interesting conclusions that these results support. This may only take a couple of sentences. I usually then follow these sentences by an optional overview of the structure of the paper with interleaved section callouts.

Ethical Sweep

I am not expecting you to be an expert in your problem domain. You do not need to do any research to answer these questions (this is a learning experience; I am not paying you to complete a job), but I want you to provide thoughtful answers.

General Questions:

  • Should we even be doing this?
  • What might be the accuracy of a simple non-ML alternative?
  • What processes will we use to handle appeals/mistakes?
  • How diverse is our team?

Data Questions:

  • Is our data valid for its intended use?
  • What bias could be in our data? (All data contains bias.)
  • How could we minimize bias in our data and model?
  • How should we “audit” our code and data?

Impact Questions:

  • Do we expect different errors rates for different sub-groups in the data?
  • What are likely misinterpretations of the results and what can be done to prevent those misinterpretations?
  • How might we impinge individuals’ privacy and/or anonymity?