In article , Don Pearce
wrote:
On Tue, 24 Aug 2010 10:12:10 +0100, Jim Lesurf
wrote:

In article , Mike Coatham
wrote:
On 23/08/2010 11:12 p.m., Jim Lesurf wrote:
In , notme
wrote:

i would like to sign off now,and thank some of the less prissy
folks

althoughyoumaywanttodismissitasprissysomeofusthink itmakessenseto
[snip]

Nice one Jim. As an aside,I hope your PHD students didn't write
their assignments in that style. I can see it now -- FAILED!

One of the duties of a PhD supervisor is to make sure the PhD is
readable - if only by the chosen examiners! :-)

Glad to say that none of my students ever failed a PhD or even failed
to submit. Although I think that tells you more about them than it does
about me.


I wish you could have helped more widely, Jim. I've read many PhDs in my
time, and they have been pretty much universally bad. Far too much text
on each page. Non-proportional fonts (must they really look
typewritten?)

The font and size may sometimes be determined by the examination rules for
the particular university. No bad thing considering the range of weird
fonts and absurd sizes you risk if there were no limits set! ;-

The regs may even give the range of number of words per full text page. And
the bindery may limit how many pages per volume they will bind. So meaning
the candidate is tempted to pack it all in to too few pages.

It can sometimes throw up oddities, though. IIRC my old uni (now Queen
Mary, U London) had regs that specified the required type of font in a
strange way. They meant to tell students things like 'don't use roman
numbers for sections, equation numbers, etc'. But ended up saying
essentially 'use arabic'. One of the students in the same dept as myself at
the time was from Egypt and was tempted to write his thesis in Egyptian
arabic. It may have met the regs, but I doubt his supervisor of the time
(who he didn't like) would have been pleased. 8-]

And I can't say that all of my own students managed to do as well in
terms of presentation and layout as one another. One of the best was
am Australian who used TeX and his thesis was very clear and ordered.
The poorest used 'Word' because he was used to it, but seemed unable
to do completely satisfactory equations and graphics.

I don't use 'Word' but I have a low opinion of it, judging by the
results I've seen from many people. I wonder if it makes decent
technical layout hard to achieve. Certainly I often found that the
appearance of 'Electronics World' looked dire to me for reasons that
seemed curiously similar to the problems I saw in reports, etc, from
students using it. Classic being lousy bitmap versions of graphs. With
lines more like arrays of lego than actual continuous lines. And quite
odd-looking equations. How much that is the software and how much the
users I can't really tell. Others may be better placed than I to
comment!


, one paragraph per two pages, roughly. Add to that nonsensical chapter
ordering, and finally a conclusion that always read "More work is needed
on this subject" and the sinking feeling was complete.

"More work is needed" is a vital conclusion for all academic research.
Otherwise they'd all be out of a job. :-) It also is a catch-all signal to
the examiners that the candidate realises he doesn't know everything. He
just needs to know more than the examiners... about that one narrow topic.

Oh yes, graphs. A microwave filter usually figured somewhere. If it was
centred on 20GHz, and had a bandwidth of 100MHz, it would be presented
on a scale of 0 to 60 GHz. There would also be upwards of a dozen
different plots on the same set of axes. An indecipherable mess would be
my kindest description.

Yes, graphics are also a minefield for the unwary. Made harder when theses
and other publications have all the graphics in monochrome. One good thing
about modern printing is that it is now possible to have very well printed
results compared to the medieval period when I typed my own PhD thesis.
TippX, carbon paper copies, and hand-written equations. Seems like stone
tablets, now... :-)

The root of the problem is, I suspect, often the same as the cause of
computer manuals being indecypherable. The writer knows the content and is
unable to grasp that the reader *doesn't* know and needs things explained
with due care. The result is often a text which only makes sense once you
have understood the contents for yourself. So can then be a useful
'reminder' or 'reference' *if* you can ever find things though the muddle
of poorly organised sections, no real index, etc.

Slainte,

Jim

--
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