ET-BE: Rules and Guidelines for Writing a Thesis

This document lays down the requirements, options and best practices for ET-BE students writing a BSc or MSc thesis. Doctoral candidates are also recommended to follow these guidelines when writing papers or theses. It comprises several sections which describe the ‘rules’ (requirements) and some advice for different aspects of a thesis. This document is not a template. The relevant repository1 provides several templates that go into the purpose of possible chapters/sections. Note that the requirements in this document are specific to the ET-BE department and might deviate from rules in other departments, faculties or study programs. It is obligatory that you investigate whether your study program has any specific thesis document requirements (often on a Canvas page). Program specific requirements supersede anything stated in this document. However, if program and department requirements are not in conflict, it is required to incorporate both. Supervisors are allowed to be more strict and specific, but not lenient with respect to the requirements given in this document. This document was adapted from the work of Prof. H. Vallery [1]. It has been modified and extended by Frank Halfwerk, Venkat Kalpathy Venkiteswan and Arvid Keemink*. Version: May 11, 2021


III. THESIS STRUCTURE REQUIREMENTS
Your thesis document requires certain components or chapters. Some of those are required, even when writing a paper. The required structure is as follows, given in required order: • Required: Cover page, free choice in design, but must include: -Document type, one of the following options: Bachelor Thesis, Master Thesis, Bachelor's Thesis or Master's Thesis. -Student name: first name and last name written in full.
E.g.: John F. Doe. Adding your own academic title (e.g. BSc at the end) is optional. * Corresponding author, e-mail: a.q.l.keemink@utwente.nl. Not for discussion or clarification, that is what your supervisor is for.
-Only if confidential, state CONFIDENTIAL in all caps.
-Thesis title -Faculty and department: Engineering Technology -Biomechanical Engineering -Graduation committee members † , including titles. You can find titles of UT staff on people.utwente.nl 2 . Be consistent for all members in the type of title use (EU/NL or UK/US). -ET-BE Report number. This will be provided by the department secretary. -Month and Year (month in which defense takes place) -Logo of the University of Twente, and possible other institution(s) at which you do your assignment (MST, Roessingh, etc.). • Optional: Any (sub)title page(s) can be placed after the cover page, but not directly on the back of the cover page. • Required: Hand-signed DoC • Optional: Acknowledgments • Optional: Preface • Required: Abstract. Note that the abstract is not a teaser but a condensed version of the work. See e.g. [2] for more information on abstract writing. • Required:

Required
• Each paragraph should contain one distinct idea or message. Also, the reader should see the paragraph's topic in either the first, second or last sentence of the paragraph. • Ensure logical connection within and between paragraphs. • Readers should know where to find which information, so use mutually exclusive headings that do not repeat in other sections or chapters. • Do not place chunks of 'loose' text between section heading and subsection heading. One or two sentences are possible, but only for an overview of the entire section. • Do not skip heading levels. Avoid using more than three levels (paper: section, subsection, subsubsection; or thesis: chapter, section, subsection). If you need to split at a deeper level, revise your structure.

Writing Advice
• It works well to write down the main ideas first, and only then to expand them to paragraphs. In this way you ensure a logical flow and solid argument between paragraphs, sections and chapters. • Except for the introduction, in which a paperoutline/thesis-outline might be mentioned, a section (chapter) should not contain only a single subsection (section). They consist of either one whole part, or more than two subsections (sections). • Balance paragraph length. Instead of fluctuating long and short paragraphs, it is easier for the reader to have medium-sized paragraphs throughout. • Preferably each chapter in a thesis starts on a new page, which is the odd numbered right page. This can indeed lead to some empty pages. • Be consistent with use of line breaks between paragraphs.
Do not equalize column length in a two-column paper unless a journal requires it.

Required
• Thesis reports and papers are written in English. Choose, together with your supervisors, UK or US spelling, and stick to a single one throughout the document. Note that old-fashioned UK spelling of certain words is falling out of fashion ('metre' to 'meter'). • Tenses: past tense for actions that have been completed or happened in the past, present tense for (derived) factual statements, and future tense for planned/future work. • Do not use contractions ('don't') or colloquial speech ('way more', 'a lot of'). Note that 'can't' is rewritten as 'cannot' (no space). • Do not use qualifiers such as 'very' and 'much'. Also, do not use 'significant' to mean 'large'. Significant has a very precise meaning in academic writing. • Avoid using qualitative adjectives like 'easy', 'simple', 'difficult', 'straightforward', 'complex', 'trivial', etc. For example, do not write: 'a complex method', 'a complicated procedure', 'it is easy to see'.
Writing Advice • Write simple, short and concise sentences. Aim for around 10 words. • Avoid static verbs and passive voice; try to write in active voice. • Do not use 'I' or 'One' (this is just an old fashioned form of I) to refer to yourself (do not use e.g. 'One can see from the data') in writing. • Pronoun 'we' is sometimes used, but is not preferred either. See if you can avoid it without resorting to passive voice. • Look up the rules for hyphenation in English, particularly for compound modifiers, to know the difference between a 'red haired person' and a 'red-haired person'. • Look up the rules for 'which' and 'that' and their required punctuation. • Merriam-Webster 5 helps with spelling and hyphenation.
Do not trust L A T E X's automatic hyphenation and provide it hyphenation exceptions. • Whenever you look something up (like grammar rules), do not trust newsgroups, forum posts or other such sources. Use reliable sources, such as books or websites by university writing centers. • Try to use only English words you know, and do not look for synonyms and alternatives. This is technical (academic) writing, not creative writing. Reuse words and reuse sentences for similar statements.

Required
• Never use other people's ideas, text or images without proper citation. Also cite, and rephrase your previous work when you reuse it. • Provide evidence for each single claim that is not an obvious fact, either in the form of a reference, or by your own experiment, deduction or calculation. Any claims your make and figures you show that have no reference are assumed to be your original work. • For all images from others, even public domain ones, check the license or obtain permission for reuse. All non-confidential theses should be published on essay.utwente.nl 6 . Therefore, all images that you did not make yourself require a license and citation. Publishers will tell you how to write such a citation.

VII. MATH & UNITS
An overview of mathematical symbols is given in L A T E X 8 , or MS Word 9 's modern equation editor. For L A T E X you can also draw your symbol 10 , and it will give the code. preferably so do all their sub-and superscripts (exception for upright 'min' or 'max' sub-/superscript). • Variables and parameters are typeset differently from text and words, typically italicized (for scalars, but sometimes also for vectors or matrices) or upright boldface (for vectors and matrices). For example: x = y 2 or Ax = b.
Preferably typeset scalars, vectors, and matrices differently. • In the exceptional case that you need words in an equation (if it conveys the message more clearly than substitution by variables), they should be upright and contain spaces, e.g. grade = number of points maximum number of points · 9 + 1.
• You can use two superscripts and two subscripts: 1 2 R 3 4 . Use brackets if indices could be confused with an exponent. But subscripts and superscripts are placed directly on top of each other. Incorrect: x 2 i , x i 2 , correct: x 2 i . • Dȯts, hâts, tildẽs, bārs, etc. are above the main symbol and are never bold. Incorrect:ẋ long ,ṗ, correct:ẋ long ,ṗ. • Every physical and non-normalized quantity has units.
Mention the units when a numerical value is given or do so 'earlier' while defining the symbols in the case that using an SI [3] unit invalidates the equation. • It is a common mistake to put square brackets around the unit. This is incorrect according to the SI [3] and the ISO norms [4].  (1) in equation (2) shows...', or 'filling in (1) in (2) shows...'. • Only direct inline equations can use the forward slash '/' for division if that improves readability. Example: 'where ω 2 0 = k/m gives. . . '. Avoid this type of construction if you can.
• Colloquial use of ± as to say 'approximately' is incorrect.
The ± symbol indicates to use both the plus and minus.
Proper use e.g. for uncertainty: 'a value of 3.0 ± 0.1 kg' or two results: y = ± √ x. There is no common symbol for 'approximately'. The caption explains the figure and state the key points. screen zoom or when printing. Do not use font sizes any smaller than the footnote size of your text. A common mistake is to make a MATLAB or SPSS figure and save it at some random (window) size. When you rescale them to the page/column width you end up with some random font size and awkward aspect ratio. • Be consistent with font type and font size for text and symbols in figures and tables. A package that helps for figures here is psfrag. You could also make plots directly in L A T E X with pgfplots and TikZ. For MAT-LAB figures, labels and ticks can be set to T E X interpretation. There is also a powerful matlab2tikz 14 function. • When drawing block diagrams (signal flow diagrams), follow IEC notation [7]. Examples: Use circles for summing points, position algebraic signs at the right side of incoming action lines, use dots for branching points, use rectangular blocks. Stick to such formal representation styles. IX. PUNCTUATION Punctuation is used to improve readability and aid understanding by providing suitable pauses between clauses in the text. A few forms of punctuation and their definitions are given below. If unsure about their usage, consult a reliable source before using them in your document.

Writing
• Period (.) All sentences must end with a period. This applies to figure and table captions as well as equations that form the end of a sentence. Chapter and (sub)section titles do not end with a period. • Comma (,) use: commas are severely underused, often abused and heavily misused. Because there is so much to say about commas, look up a decent book on grammar.
(Do not forget the Oxford comma!) • Note that there are four different kinds of dashes: the hyphen '-', the en-dash '-', the em-dash '-', and the minus sign '−'. They are used in different scenarios: hyphen (-): compound single words: red-haired.
en-dash (-): compound multiple words: pre-World War (to avoid pre-World-War), ranges: pg 1-9. em-dash (-): to use for subordinate clauses (NL 'bijzin') • Colon (:) use: when you announce something, a list, noun or quotation. • Semi-colon (;) use: to combine independent clauses to avoid choppy separate sentences. • Quotes: quotes should be opening (' or ") and closing (' or "). In MS Word this is done automatically. In L A T E X use one or more ' for opening and ' for closing quotes. Incorrect: "something" ("something" or ''something''), correct: "something" (''something''). Double quotes are often reserved for quotations. • Apostrophe: the genitive (possessive) always uses apostrophe +s ('the machine's size'), even when a word ends in ch, z or x. The only exception is when a word or name already ends in an s, then only the apostrophe is used ('planet Mars' orbit'). Apostrophes are not used to indicate the plural form. Incorrect: The car's are moving slowly.
X. LATIN ABBREVIATIONS Common Latin abbreviations that are used in writing, but should never be used in oral (academic) presentations: • i.e., stands for id est, which means 'that is'. Use it to make a statement more specific and exclusive. Do not start a sentence with 'I.e.', it should appear after a comma or at the start of a sentence fragment between brackets. • e.g., stands for exempli gratia, which means 'for example'. Use it to give one or more nonexclusive examples. Do not start a sentence with 'E.g.', it should appear after a comma or at the start of a sentence fragment between brackets. • et al., stands for et alii, which means 'and colleagues'.
The period is required after the 'al'.
XI. FURTHER WRITING RESOURCES