Chapter: 10 - Formal Reports

Download as pdf or txt
Download as pdf or txt
You are on page 1of 32

Chapter: 10 – Formal Reports

2
Headings in a Report

Second-level Heading in a Report

Third-level heading in a short report 3


Decimal Headings

4
Parts of a Formal Reports and FYP
5
1. Cover/title page
2. Letter or memo of transmittal
3. Table of contents
4. List of illustrations
5. Executive summary
6. Introduction
7. Discussion sections
8. Conclusions and recommendations
9. End material

6
Formal Report FYP
Cover/title page Title Page
Letter or memo of transmittal Undertaking
Table of contents Table of contents
List of illustrations List of Tables
Executive summary List of Figures
Introduction Abstract
Discussion sections Introduction (Chapter-1)
Conclusions and recommendations Literature Review (Chapter-2)
End material Requirements and Design (Chapter: 3)
Implementation and Test Scores (Chapter: 4)
Results and Analysis (Chapter: -5)
Conclusions (Chapter-6)
References
Appendix

7
Cover/Title Page
■ Project title
■ Your client’s or recipient’s name (“Prepared for . . .”)
■ Your name and/or the name of your organization (“Prepared by
. . .”)
■ Date of submission

Use a visual only if reinforces a main point.

8
Letter/memo of Transmittal
▪ Place Letter/memo immediately after the title page

▪ Include a major point from the report (Why you are


writing/ What exactly of importance is within it

▪ Follow letter and memo conventions (e.g. single-spacing;


use only one page)

9
10
Table of Contents
▪ It acts as an outline
▪ It should be a complete and accurate listing of the main and minor
topics covered in the report.
▪ You don’t want just a brief and sketchy outline of major headings.
▪ An effective table of contents fleshes out the details, so your
readers know exactly what is covered in each section – saves their
time and helps them find the information they want and need.

11
12
List of Illustrations
▪ If your report contains several tables and figures, you will need
to provide a list of illustrations.

▪ This list can be included below your table of contents, if there is


room on the page, or on a separate page.

▪ As with the table of contents, your list of illustrations must be


clear and informative.

13
Abstract (or Executive Summary)
▪ The abstract is a brief overview of the report’s key points geared
towards a varied audience from a low-tech reader to managers,
supervisors, and highly placed executives.

▪ They need your help in two ways:


➢ They need information quickly
➢ They need it presented in a low-tech terminology
▪ You can achieve both these objectives through an abstract or
executive summary.

14
Introduction
▪ Not to summarize the report
▪ Give information on, the report’s:
1. Purpose: State your purpose, as the first part of the introduction
2. Scope: detail and description of your project should be written clearly
3. Format: a brief preview of the main sections that follow

15
Conclusion/Recommendation
▪ Providing your readers with a sense of closure

▪ Discuss results based on findings of your study.

▪ Recommendations are actions suggested on the basis of your


conclusion.

▪ Executive summary consists of a brief description of the most


important conclusion and recommendation, whereas the
conclusion/recommendation section is an expanded version of the
executive summary.

16
Appendices
▪ A final optional component is and appendix.
▪ It allows you to include any additional information (surveys, results,
tables, figures, previous report findings, relevant letters or memos,
etc.) that you have not built in your report’s main text.
▪ The contents of your appendix should not be of primary importance,
which needs to be the part of the body of the report.
▪ An appendix is a perfect place to file nonessential data that provides
documentation for future reference.

17
References (or Bibliography)
▪ The two parts to referencing are:
▫ citations in the text of the report
▫ a list of references in the final section
▪ A citation shows that information comes from another source.
The reference list gives the details of these sources. You need to use
in-text citations and provide details in the references section when:
▫ you incorporate information from other sources; e.g.:
▫ factual material
▫ graphs and tables of data
▫ pictures and diagrams

18
In-text citation

Corrosion is defined as a 'chemical action which harms the


properties of a metal' (Glendinning 1973, p.12). Because
corrosion reduces the life of the material and protection
procedures are expensive, special corrosion-resistant metals
have been developed, including Monel metals which are
particularly suited to marine applications (Glendinning 1973).

Reference list entry

Glendinning, E.H. 1973 English in mechanical engineering, Oxford, Oxford


University Press.
19
1.Writing an ABSTRACT
FORMAL REPORT WRITING
WHY?
• You may write an abstract for various reasons.
• The two most important are selection and indexing.
• Selection:
After reading the abstract, one can make an informed judgment about
whether the dissertation/article/report would be worthwhile to read.
• Indexing:
Classifying information in order to make items easier to retrieve.

21
WHEN
▪ Submitting articles to journals, especially online journals
▪ Applying for research grants
▪ Writing a book proposal
▪ Completing the Ph.D. dissertation, M.A. thesis or project report.
▪ Writing a proposal for a conference paper
▪ Writing a proposal for a book chapter
▪ Abstracts are written at the end of the project.

22

Qualities of a Good Abstract
✓ Uses one well developed paragraph which is unified, coherent,
concise, and able to stand alone.
✓ Uses an introduction/body/conclusion structure which presents the
article, paper, or report's purpose, method, Results, conclusion(s),
and recommendations in that order.
✓ Follows strictly the chronology of the article, paper, or report.
✓ Provides logical connections (or transitions) between the
information included.
✓ Adds no new information, but simply summarizes the report.
✓ Is understandable to a wide audience.
✓ Any major restrictions or limitations on the results should be stated,
if only by using "weasel-words" such as "might", "could", "may", and
"seem".
23
Types of Abstracts
Descriptive: (less than 100 words)
▪ Indicates the type of information found in the work.
▪ Makes no judgments about the work, nor does it provide results
or conclusions of the research.
Informative: (more than 250 words)
▪ The writer presents and explains all the main arguments and the
important results and evidence present in the complete
report/article/paper/book.
▪ Do not critique or evaluate a work, they do more than describe it.

24
Example (Descriptive): The two most common abstract types—
descriptive and informative—are described and examples of each are
provided.

Example (Informative): Abstracts present the essential elements of a


longer work in a short and powerful statement. The purpose of an
abstract is to provide prospective readers the opportunity to judge the
relevance of the longer work to their projects. Abstracts also include the
key terms found in the longer work and the purpose and methods of the
research. Authors abstract various longer works, including book
proposals, dissertations, and online journal articles. There are two main
types of abstracts: descriptive and informative. A descriptive abstract
briefly describes the longer work, while an informative abstract presents
all the main arguments and important results. This handout provides
examples of various types of abstracts and instructions on how to
construct one.
25
Executive Summaries vs. Abstracts

▪ Executive summaries go by so many different names. Sometimes the


executive summary is called an Abstract. You usually find that
designation in scientific papers and academic efforts. You can also
call the Executive Summary simply a Summary.

▪ Abstracts differ from executive summaries, because abstracts are


usually written for a scientific or academic purpose.

26
Abstract Components (HOW)
Brief Backgound (optional)
Reason for What is the importance of the research? Why would a
writing reader be interested in the larger work?
Problem (Optional) What problem does this work attempt to
solve? What is the scope of the project? What is the main
argument/thesis/claim?
Methodology An abstract of a scientific work may include specific
models or approaches used in the larger study.
Reults/ Findings/ An abstract of a scientific work may include specific data
Implementation that indicates the results of the project.

Conclusion and What changes should be implemented as a result of the


Implications findings of the work? 27
Sample Abstract
This study’s objective was to/focuses on determine the strangeness
measurements for red, green, and blue quarks. The Britt-Cushman
method for quark analysis exploded/explode a quarkstream in a He
gas cloud. Results indicate that both red and green quarks had a
strangeness that differed by less than 0.453 x 10-17 Zabes/m2 for all
measurements. Blue quarks remained immeasurable, since their
particle traces bent into 7-tuple space. This study’s conclusions
indicate that red and green quarks can be used interchangeably in all
He stream applications, and further studies must be done to
measure the strangeness of blue quarks.

28
Compound Sentence Segmentation and Sentence Boundary Detection in Urdu
The raw Urdu corpus comprises of irregular and large sentences which need to be properly segmented in
order to make them useful in Natural Language Engineering (NLE). This makes the Compound Sentences
Segmentation (CSS) timely and vital research topic. The existing online text processing tools are developed
mostly for computationally developed languages such as English, Japanese and Spanish etc., where sentence
segmentation is mostly done on the basis of delimiters. Our proposed approach uses special characters as
sentence delimiters and computationally extracted sentence-endletters and sentence-end-words as identifiers
for segmentation of large and compound sentences. The raw and unannotated input text is passed through
preprocessing and word segmentation. Urdu word segmentation itself is a complex task including knotty
problems such as space insertion and space deletion etc. Main and subordinate clauses are identified and
marked for subsequent processing. The resultant text is further processed in order to identify, extract and
then segment large as well as compound sentences into regular Urdu sentences. Urdu computational
research is in its infancy. Our work is pioneering in Urdu CSS and results achieved by our proposed
approach are promising. For experimentation, we used a general genre raw Urdu corpus containing 2616
sentences and 291503 words. We achieved 34% improvement in reduction of average sentence length from
111 w/s to 38 w/s (words per sentence). This increased the number of sentences by almost three times to
7536 shorter and computationally easy to manage sentences. Resultant text reliability and coherence are
verified by Urdu language experts.
Compound Sentence Segmentation and Sentence Boundary Detection in Urdu
Background: The raw Urdu corpus comprises of irregular and large sentences which need to be properly
segmented in order to make them useful in Natural Language Engineering (NLE). This makes the Compound
Sentences Segmentation (CSS) timely and vital research topic.
Problem: The existing online text processing tools are developed mostly for computationally developed
languages such as English, Japanese and Spanish etc., where sentence segmentation is mostly done on the basis of
delimiters.
Purpose: Our proposed approach uses special characters as sentence delimiters and computationally extracted
sentence-endletters and sentence-end-words as identifiers for segmentation of large and compound sentences.
Method: The raw and unannotated input text is passed through preprocessing and word segmentation. Urdu word
segmentation itself is a complex task including knotty problems such as space insertion and space deletion etc.
Main and subordinate clauses are identified and marked for subsequent processing. The resultant text is further
processed in order to identify, extract and then segment large as well as compound sentences into regular Urdu
sentences. Urdu computational research is in its infancy. Our work is pioneering in Urdu CSS and results achieved
by our proposed approach are promising. For experimentation, we used a general genre raw Urdu corpus
containing 2616 sentences and 291503 words.
Result: We achieved 34% improvement in reduction of average sentence length from 111 w/s to 38 w/s (words
per sentence). This increased the number of sentences by almost three times to 7536 shorter and computationally
easy to manage sentences. Resultant text reliability and coherence are verified by Urdu language experts.
Urdu Language Translator using Deep Neural Network
It was clearly seen that the proposed model shows the high accuracy when the input is recorded audio
and it shows poor performance with real time input. While one HTTP request per input transcription
produced English translation for Text to Text translation using Python Text Blob library. This paper
proposes an interactive Urdu to English language speech translator using deep Neural Network. ASR
module in proposed pipeline is composed of deep neural network and is simpler as compared to
traditional ASR which requires complex hand engineering like feature extraction and resources like
phoneme dictionary. The proposed speech recognition model out performs traditional automatic speech
recognition systems in efficiency, simplicity and robustness. The final output was achieved with a delay
of no more than 30 seconds. Furthermore, we have tested and provided some statistical findings, the
result shows that value updating for neural network layer’s bias, standard deviation when Adam
optimizer parameters are set as follows: beta1=0.9, beta2=0.9 and learning rate =0.01 meanwhile
dropout rate was kept to 5% to offer regularization and observed value for scalar maximum lies between
0 and 0.08. There is a little deviation at 0.05 step, value decreases and afterwards that bias maximum
scalar increases with positive values and finally increases exponentially at later stages of training further
results are discussed in experiment section respectively.
Urdu Language Translator using Deep Neural Network
Purpose: This paper proposes an interactive Urdu to English language speech translator using deep Neural Network.
ASR module in proposed pipeline is composed of deep neural network and is simpler as compared to traditional ASR
which requires complex hand engineering like feature extraction and resources like phoneme dictionary.
Method: It was clearly seen that the proposed model shows the high accuracy when the input is recorded audio and it
shows poor performance with real time input. While one HTTP request per input transcription produced English
translation for Text to Text translation using Python Text Blob library.
Result: The final output was achieved with a delay of no more than 30 seconds. Furthermore, we have tested and
provided some statistical findings, the result shows that value updating for neural network layer’s bias, standard
deviation when Adam optimizer parameters are set as follows: beta1=0.9, beta2=0.9 and learning rate =0.01
meanwhile dropout rate was kept to 5% to offer regularization and observed value for scalar maximum lies between 0
and 0.08. There is a little deviation at 0.05 step, value decreases and afterwards that bias maximum scalar increases
with positive values and finally increases exponentially at later stages of training further results are discussed in
experiment section respectively.
Conclusion: The proposed speech recognition model out performs traditional automatic speech recognition systems
in efficiency, simplicity and robustness.

You might also like