Posts Tagged Writing

On giving helpful feedback

This two-page note provides guidance for commenting on mathematics papers. Suggestions are given for instructors who feel that most or all errors should be marked, and for instructors who comment primarily on small-scale errors such as wording. Suggestions include directing the student to develop a personalized editing checklist, encouraging the student to identify his or her own solutions to writing problems whenever possible, and using a commenting checklist as a reminder to consider larger-scale issues such as structure and to look for possible honest praise to provide.

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Notes on Writing

These 8-page notes address the parts of a paper; mathematical style for attribution, citation, and internal references; the distinction between belief and proof; and a miscellany of 15 common errors. These errors range from grammatical issues such as articles and comma splices to errors of precision, notational consistency, and sequencing of information. Examples are included.

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Notation and LaTeX table & fig HW

The logic exercises in this assignment require students to translate between formal notation and conceptual language, to learn to LaTeX a table, and to include a figure in a LaTeX document. The assignment is from the second week of M.I.T.’s communication-intensive offering of Real Analysis. It was developed by the 18.100C team, especially Todd Kemp and Joel Lewis.

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Math Supplement for Academic Integrity Handbook

This student handout includes examples of plagiarism of math writing as well as examples of acceptable paraphrasing of math sources. The handout is written in the style of and is meant to accompany M.I.T.’s Academic Integrity Handbook, which has similar examples from humanities contexts. The Academic Integrity Handbook is available at http://integrity.mit.edu/handbook/academic-writing/avoiding-plagiarism-paraphrasing

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Lefschetz with highlighted revisions

These drafts of an article by Mark McLean illustrate how a proof can be improved by pulling out a lemma. Although the article is on an analysis topic beyond the understanding of Real Analysis students, Mohammed Abouzaid has drawn attention to the structure of the article by highlighting relevant guiding text, so the improvement caused by pulling out a lemma is clear.

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LaTeX skeleton for journal article

Skeleton for journal articles to be published in M.I.T.’s Undergraduate Journal of Mathematics. The journal is no longer published, but this skeleton is still used in some of M.I.T.’s communication-intensive math classes. Save the style files as mathp2e.sty and thmp2e.sty (remove the final number from each name) and store them in the same folder as the .tex file.

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