VR Seminars: Writing Guidelines
General
- As specified in the schedule, the final version of the seminar paper must be handed in to the supervisor prior to the seminar presentation. This should not be a chicane, but serves to avoid final stressful situations. The last two weeks should be used for the preparation of your presentation.
- The elaboration of your topic is not a literal translation, but a summary of the underlying references, which should be supplemented by examples, sketches, and comparisons.
- If texts are used as exact quotes from other publications, they must be marked as quotes, e.g., by quotation marks and a corresponding reference.
- If ideas are adopted or aggregated from other publications, they must be referenced. Therefore, add the corresponding paper to the reference section and mark the text passage accordingly.
- Copying text from other publications without appropriate references represents a form of unlawful appropriation of intellectual property and is therefore not allowed in a seminar paper.
Layout
- The paper has to comprise 16-21 pages of pure written text for a main seminar and 9-13 pages for a proseminar.
- For the (pro)seminars the page requirement must be already fulfilled when handing in the first version of the seminar paper.
- For writing the paper, please use our template.
- There is no general recommendation relating to the outline of the paper. A common outline which works in most cases is presented in the following:
- Introduction
- Related Work
- Main part (divided into sections)
- Summary
- References
Style
- As a matter of course, at a university papers are written in complete sentences. Take (at least) one look at the spelling. Anyone who does not know the spelling should definitely use a dictionary, or one of the tools that current writing tools supply.
- You should opt for a consistent spelling (best for the official).
- When writing the paper, you should put yourself in the situation of the reader and write in an easily understandable way. It is convenient to first informally explain the facts by examples or sketches and then provide a formal description.
- Graphics and images are always beneficial and liven up the strict scientific contribution. However, each figure must be referenced in the text and of course the figure should go well with the content.
