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1. Structure
The following sections roughly correspond to the chapters of your thesis. You can have more or less chapters, but this seems to be the right number. Every time you write a section or a chapter, re-visit these recommendations and check whether you fullfilled all the requirements.
1.2. Introduction
A usual mistake that students commit in the Introduction chapter is to start from the beginning, I mean basics, and keep introducing the background without ever telling what this thesis actually does. Recall the first part of the above advice: "First you tell 'em what you're going to tell 'em." This literally means providing an "elevator speech" about your work. Describe at a high level what your thesis actually achieves and how, rather than talking in general about general about general ... Describe why is this work relevant and worthy solving; why would anybody care about the problem that you're trying to solve? what use of it? What benefits would be accrued should your effort succeed? Justify the whole effort.
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1. What is the problem that you're solving? 2. Why is it relevant and worthy solving? 3. What is difficult about your problem? Success Criteria -- Outline exact criteria for determining whether the progress is made or even all objectives are accomplished. These should be stated so that you'd be able to apply them to the work somebody else did for you and judge whether they actually solved the problem. Briefly summarize how you plan to solve the problem. Hypothesize what approach could be pursued and what kind of results should be expected. State explicitly your intuitions and expectatations in the following form: If this approach is taken, the resulting system/product will have faster performance, or shorter code, or smaller communication overhead, or the new approach will prevent user errors, or ... Present a Roadmap of the thesis -- how it is organized, what the reader should expect in each chapter.
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Provide a brief overview of the tools and methods that you will use to solve the problem. Here you provide a brief review of the software toolkits or libraries that you used. Or, network technologies, such as Motes, RFID, ZigBee protocol, or whatever are the tools that you employed to your purpose. Some of the details may be appropriate to put in the appendix (see Section 1.8 below). Cite references to more detailed sources about these tools and techniques. Elaborate your idea for solving the problem, with all the details of software design or mathematical model derivation. - Provide arguments why you believe your approach should work - Describe the alternatives that you considered at every step - Explain why you decided not to pursue the alternatives.
1.6. Conclusions
Briefly summarize what are the main contributions of your work. This is usually best done by restating the hypotheses and describing how the observed results met those expectations. Best format is a bulletted list. Should somebody else follow up along the lines of your work, what would you recommend to do next. In other words, what would be a good topic or topics for a new thesis related to this problem.
1.7. References
References should be ordered alphabetically, by the (first) author's last name. Cite all the sources you use and provide full citations even for the webpage URL:
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Author, "Title of the Work," Forum where it Appeared (journal, conference, web, ...), Year. If you copy a figure or a method for solving a (small or large) problem, make sure you credit the source.
1.8. Appendix
This section is optional, in case you want to attach a printout of the source code, or some involved mathematical derivations, or user's manual for running your system, or printout of simulation results, etc. You may also want to put in this section description of the software toolkits or other technologies that you used.
2. Document Formatting
The link below is Rutgers thesis and dissertation style guide: http://gsnb.rutgers.edu/style_guide.php3 Note that you are required to follow the formatting guidelines. The graduate school staff will check the compliance and refuse to accept your thesis document if found not to comply. v v v You can find much more about this topic here: CMU's Advice on Research and Writing (Collected resources about writing and research ) Research Resources, Compiled by Richard G. Baraniuk, Rice University How to do Research in the MIT AI Lab, ed. David Chapman Bill Pugh's article Advice to Authors of Extended Abstracts on how to write a successful paper. Writing Technical Articles, by Henning Schulzrinne, Columbia University An excellent style manual and source of information for science writers is: Matt Young, Technical Writer's Handbook: Writing With Style and Clarity, University Science Books, 2002.
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