BTR820 Lecture 3

January 15th, 2008

"Look it up, don't make it up."

Formatting and structure are different things

• Formatting - Making it look nice (font, layout, etc)
• Structure - ideas in the right place... using evidence
  

White papers accept the liberal use of:

• whitespace
• have giant titles
• no indentation
• 'full block' formatting
• can/should use much smaller paragraphs
• bullets are used (and stylized)
• colour (headings)
• headings

subheadings mean that you are talking about a small element of a greater topic

Bad example:

• Why is the text in two different colours?
• why is there two types of bullets?
• why 5 colours

Full Block
- straight down the left hand side, space btwn paragraphs (see slides for rules)
- looks pretty boring
- 2 spaces after paragraph
- 1 space after headings

Business writing differs from Essays
- business not double spaced
- in headings

Headings

• Use 2 or 3 per page (by rule)
• they mark off major and minor divisions
• should be descriptive and unique
• Some readers use only headings to get a feel for the paper
• Even with subheadings

Headings serve the purpose

• Navigation
• Reader knows where she is
• can easily find sections
• Content
• Scanning the doc

Distinguish 1st - 2nd - 3rd level headings some way

Headings should be descriptive and unique
- Introduction, summary, and experiment are bad headings
- Emerging VOIP companies, Why we need to replace DES, Cracking DES are good headings

Mistakes

• Non-parallel headings (differing grammatic)
  
• RAID data recovery
• recoving data from PCs
• Stacked headings
• You need some text between first and second level headings
• Do not jump straight into a list
• You can drop 'A' and 'The' from headings

Descriptive Unique 2-3/page

Lists
- lists should be used when things get boring (comprehension is difficult)... OR where you need the reader to do something (step by step). Lists do not necessarily be one line long

Every list must have a stem sentence