Outline and Early Draft

Requirements

By now, you should have a good idea of your project’s motivations, scope, and potential results. Thus, you will now start filling in portions that will become your final report. For now, you only need to complete a rough draft of the introduction and related works sections (or combine them into a single narrative, whichever you find easier to write).

Create a new web-page with the following.

  • Add an outline of your entire report at the top of the document. Take a look at the reports from previus semesters for inspiration.
  • Fill in your introduction outline and either weave-in the related works descriptions or create a new related works section.
  • Write 400 to 800 words total (roughly one to two pages).

You will submit a link to your web-page on gradescope.

All of the information you provide is tentative, and I expect many groups to change their minds as projects evolve.

How to outline a technical report

Writing your introduction and related works sections will be much easier if you start with an outline of your entire draft. Outlining will help you

  • organize your thoughts,
  • get your team on the same page,
  • order your arguments and supporting evidence,
  • develop relationships between your topics, and
  • direct your background reading.

Here is an abridged outline scaffold (your actual outline should have real sentences):

  1. Title
  2. Authors
  3. Abstract (no need to fill this in yet)
  4. Introduction
  5. Ethics Discussion
  6. Related Works
  7. Methods
  8. Discussion/Results
  9. Conclusion/Future Work
  10. References

Each section should have a sentence or two describing what you plan to include. You can also change the order and section names to match your project.

You can find a more concrete example in Indeed’s advice on writing a research paper outline.

Here are three more sources for advice on how to outline a technical report:

References section

The key idea for the related works section is that it should be easy to read. It will no longer be a set of disjoint paragraphs as you may have had previously. You should group together similar related studies and add transition sentences.

You will need to keep a references section at the end of the document. Please use markdown footnotes for your citations. Here is an example report with proper citations.