Technical writing notes

Best practices and common mistakes for NPS theses

A collection of best practices and common mistakes for technical writing at NPS — in particular for theses in the MAE department. These notes complement the official thesis guidelines and template; if there is any conflict in style recommendations, use the official NPS processing guidelines.

Ideally these will save you time, so you don’t have to fix known issues during the revision process.

Warning

Reading this will save us all time and re-work. If it becomes clear that you have not read and understood these guidelines, I reserve the right to return your draft immediately without further review.

Contributions

The contributions of a thesis or research paper should be clear and concise. I recommend a subsection titled Contributions listing them in bullet form. There do not need to be many — one to three is typical — but they are critically important in guiding what evidence belongs in the work and what is left out. Everything in the document should relate to these points, helping you substantiate the claims.

Paraphrasing a colleague: “all research must answer a definitive question; good research answers an important question.” M. E. Swisher’s What Constitutes a Good Contribution provides worthwhile guidance.

General grammar

If you don’t know how to use a particular grammatical construction, look it up rather than inventing your own usage. For example: when you use the word “but,” when should there be a preceding comma? There is a great deal of specific guidance online from many good sources.

For the basics — which cover 95% of what you need — I highly recommend Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style, available free online. Developing habits that follow the usage guidelines in this very short book will save you a lot of revision time.

Figures and tables

There is a distinction between figure titles and captions:

  • The NPS thesis template puts figure titles below the image. As the template explains, figure titles are capitalized like a book title. This is what appears in the list of figures.
  • A figure caption is a brief explanation of the image contents, written in complete sentences and punctuated accordingly. The template formats these as Figure Secondary Caption. Captions are optional, but encouraged — a good portion of readers look at your figures and read the captions as the first step in reading your work.

Other rules that come up constantly:

  • All graphs should have labels on all axes, and the labels should include engineering units.
  • Any text in the figure — labels, legends — should use a font size similar to the document text and be clearly readable.
  • A common mistake is an image that carries its own title. For figures there should be no title inside the image (no title() command in MATLAB); the title belongs to the document.

See figures for writing for how to produce publication-quality images from MATLAB.

Equations, numbers, and units

Important

These two aspects of thesis preparation are the most problematic.

Equations

  • Equations are grammatical elements within your document and should be punctuated accordingly.
  • See the ASME guidelines for how to reference equations in the text.
  • A Guide to Writing Mathematics, by Dr. Kevin P. Lee, is a good description of how to use equations in your text.

Numbers and units

  • Rules for the use of numbers in scientific writing — a succinct set of rules (Word version).
  • Use SI units, and use the abbreviation for the units when accompanying numerals.
  • Use a space between a number and its units: 0.5 m, not 0.5m.
  • When using a number less than 1.0, use a leading zero: 0.5 m, not .5 m.
  • Know the difference between a hyphen (-), an en dash (–), and an em dash (—). Use them correctly and know how to enter them in your typesetting software. Don’t use spaces before or after hyphens or dashes.
    • Hyphens connect compound terms: free-for-all.
    • En dashes are for ranges and can be read as through: 0.5–0.4 m.
    • Em dashes are for parenthetical expressions.

Guidelines for Equations, Units, and Mathematical Notation (Louisiana Tech University) is a good reference here — see in particular Section 4, “Numbers and units of measurement, in equations or anywhere in the document.”

Style and citations

For issues not explicitly defined in the NPS template and style guide, the MAE department defaults to the ASME guidelines. Pay particular attention to the Equations and References sections.

Use ASME citation style, which is very similar to IEEE style.

For capitalization, see the Thesis Capitalization Rules under Style and Grammar in Thesis Processing: Resources.

Further resources

The PDFs linked above are archived copies of third-party documents, kept here because external links rot. Each is credited to its author; rights remain with them.