Scholarship Skills
PSU CS510 (Section 011)
OGI GEN569/669

Course Overview: The purpose of this course is to make you better scholars. In particular it attempts to make you better researchers, better writers, better presenters, and better reviewers. It concentrates on your reading, writing and composition skills. The course concentrates on both the production and consumption of the “media” used by computer scientists to communicate today. 

You will learn to both read and write papers, such as conference and journal articles; You will learn to both listen to and prepare and deliver oral presentations.  You will also learn skills that will prepare you for your career as a scholar: How to choose a thesis topic, and how to write a thesis; How to be an effective reviewer of material written by others; How to prepare yourself for the job hunt in academia or industry when you graduate. When you’re through with this course you should have a feel for the tasks and activities of modern scholars.
 

Instructors:  

• Tim Sheard, office FAB 120-04, phone: 503-725-2410
  
• Todd Leen, office: BCB 150E, phone: 503-748-1160, fax: 503-748-1548,
  

Topical Link -- OGI-CSEE RPE exam information.

Required Texts:
  Lyn Dupre. Bugs in Writing.  Addison Wesley, ISGM 0-201-60019-6. 
  (Some online notes are at http://www.ai.sri.com/~wilkins/dupre.html. )

Ancillary Texts: 

  Mark Zobel.  Writing for Computer Science.  Springer 1997.  ISBN 9-813-08322-0.

  Mary-Clair van Leunen, A Handbook for Scholars, 2nd Ed,  Oxford University Press, 
  1992.  Some online notes are at http://www.cse.ruu.nl/docs/tandt/html/Scholars/.

  William Zinsser.  On Writing Well.  Harpercollins, 1994,

  Donald E. Knuth, Tracy Larrabee, and Paul M. Robers, Mathematical Writing.
  MAA Notes Number 14, The Mathematical Association of America, 1989.

  William Strunk, Jr. and E. B. White.  The Elements of Style, Allyn and Bacon, 1995. 
  (You can find this text on line.)

  Nichoals Higham, Handbook of Writing for the Mathematical Sciences, SIAM, 1993.

  Robert I. Berkman. Find It Fast. Harper Perennial, 1997. 

  Elizabeth Castro. HTML for the World Wide Web, 4th Ed.: Visual Quickstart Guide,
   Peachpit Press, 2000.

  Gary Blake and Robert W. Bly, The Elements of Technical Writing, Macmillan, 1993.

  Henry Watson Fowler.  The New Fowler's Modern English Usage, R.W. Burchfield (Editor), Oxford, 2000.