Publishing opportunities for student writing include the following: The Columbia Journal of Undergraduate Mathematics publishes expository writing by undergraduates, “to provide undergraduate readers with high-quality, accessible articles on challenging topics, or novel approaches to teaching more familiar concepts.” “The Minnesota Journal of Undergraduate Mathematics focuses on original mathematical research done primarily by undergraduate researchers in all areas of mathematics and its applications.” The Rose-Hulman Undergraduate Mathematics Journal is a publication devoted entirely to papers written by undergraduate students on mathematical topics. The student work must be sponsored by a mathematician familiar with the student’s work. “Involve showcases and encourages high-quality
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There are many reasons to have students give each other feedback on their writing, but students are likely to require some guidance to give effective peer critique, and coordinating critique requires some planning. Advantages of peer critique Students learn from seeing effective practices modeled by other students as well as from seeing pitfalls they’d like to avoid. Struggling to understand a peer’s writing emphasizes for students the importance of writing clearly. Writing recommendations for improvement helps students to clarify their own understanding of how to write well. Students often learn from their peers’ comments that their writing isn’t as clear
Read more →[The following notes are from Steven Kleiman’s 2010 Undergraduate Seminar in Computational Commutative Algebra and Algebraic Geometry at MIT. Many of the files below can be downloaded in one zip folder.] Here are some files to help you write mathematics in a way that is more professional in style and format. The following files are the two source files and two compiled versions of the guide, “Writing a Math Phase Two Paper:” piiUJM2.tex || figure.ps || piiUJM2.dvi || piiUJM2.pdf This guide gives a lot of tips on writing a short math paper, and also serves as a model of one.
Read more →[The following notes are about Steven Kleiman’s 2010 Undergraduate Seminar in Computational Commutative Algebra and Algebraic Geometry, in which the students give the lectures and write a term paper. The main page for this course is here.] The term paper is to be a ten-page essay on a topic related to the course. The goal is for you to learn something new, and to explain it clearly to others in the class, or better, to other upper-class math majors. The paper must be written in a professional style, and formatted in AMS-LaTeX, like the papers in MIT’s Undergraduate Journal of
Read more →[The following notes are from Steven Kleiman’s 2010 Undergraduate Seminar in Computational Commutative Algebra and Algebraic Geometry at MIT.] Another innovation, this spring of 2010, was requiring incremental drafts of the term papers. First, the week after spring break, all ten students handed in a one-page outlines, showing that they done preliminary research of a topic and made a stab at organizing it. The outlines were good, but usually overly ambitious. The next week, the first third of the paper was due. I read each draft, and discussed it individually with its author. The discussions lasted about fifteen minutes and
Read more →Writing well requires mastery of writing principles at a variety of different scales, from the sentence and paragraph scale (e.g., ordering information within sentences so content flows logically) to the section and paper scale (e.g., larger-scale structure). To simplify teaching, you can begin the term with shorter assignments to address the smaller-scale issues so you can more easily focus on the larger-scale issues when you assign longer assignments later in the term. At all scales, students best learn to communicate as mathematicians if the assignments are as authentic as possible: if the genre and rhetorical context are as similar as
Read more →The sheer volume of advice available “out there” on writing mathematics can be quite intimidating. Here’s a (nonexhaustive) list of interesting pieces. Many of these were found by undergraduate researcher Artur Araujo. Writing mathematics well (audience is mathematicians) Terry Tao’s blog contains several posts dedicated to this topic: On Writing links to many of Terry’s posts on various aspects of writing mathematics well. Be considerate of your audience. From the Early Career Section of Notices of the American Mathematical Society “Journaling” by Robert Lazarsfeld, Jan 2019 “Writing for Mathematical Reviews” by Kelly Jabbusch, Feb 2019 “Writing, and Reading, Referee Reports” by Arend Bayer,
Read more →Most of this page focuses on “learning to write”; i.e., on assessing how well students communicate mathematics. Near the bottom of the page are sections on “writing to learn” and “writing to assess”: some writing assignments are designed primarily to help students to learn mathematics, while others are designed primarily to help teachers assess student understanding of mathematics. These call for different feedback and assessment strategies than “learning to write.” Commenting strategies As you give students feedback on their writing, you might consider commenting on mathematical correctness, clarity, flow and organization, and other general principles of communicating mathematics. A balance
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