Welcom to Li Yan's homepage, I am a student of CSE, UCR
Focus, and prioritize.
Lessons learned in writing thesis
- Have a plan. A bad plan is better than no plan because you can recognize and correct them early. Structural changes are expensive.
- Bring your plan to your professors, colleagues for comments. You can have a series of plans with varying level of details, e.g., chapter titles only, chapter and section titles only.
- If you do not know what to write or how to write, stop and take a break.
- If you are typing faster than your brain could support, take a pen and write on paper.
- Seek help early and from anybody who is serious about reading your draft.
- Break the project down into pieces. We humans all have a limit when handling complexity. The difference is that good people simply knows how to control it.
- Write chapters, sections and ask people to read only part of your thesis because most people either cannot afford the time, or do not have the patience, or would take a long time to finish reading your whole thesis, assumed to be spanning 100+ pages, double-spaced.
- For help with English, the Graduate Writing Center of UCR is super helpful. The staff there know how to write good English and they will read your draft about grammar and related.
UCR thesis writing tips
This summarizes the technical issues I had with the latex template for UCR dissertation/thesis writing and my solutions. There is no guarantee that they will work for your particular needs. If you encountered an issue and solved it and would like to list it here, send me an email.
- Pages seem to shift to bottom right.
Solution: add
\setlength\headsep{-0.5in}
to preamble. That is, before \begin{document}.
- \cal not defined.
Solution:
add to preamble:
% for \cal definition
\makeatletter
\DeclareRobustCommand*\cal{\@fontswitch\relax\mathcal}
\makeatother
- Need caption to be single spaced
Solution:
\def\dsp{\def\baselinestretch{2.0}\large\normalsize}
\def\ssp{\def\baselinestretch{1.0}\large\normalsize}
\dsp % this begins double spacing
\ssp % begins single spacing
\dsp % revert to double spacing
- A blank page appeared right after abstract
Solution:
replace
\def\endabstract{\par\vfil\null\end{alwayssingle}
with
\def\endabstract{\end{alwayssingle} %% save a parskip to avoid a blank page
- To have figures or tables side by side, or in two columns, or vertically aligned
\usepackage{subcaption}
\begin{subfigure}{.45\textwidth}
\includegraphics[.45\textwidth]{image.pdf}
or use tikzpicture
\end{subfigure}
\begin{subtable}
\end{subtable}
Miscellaneous Tricks