FYP Report Style Guide

With the dissertation deadline season upon us, I just wanted to share some extra tips for maximising your marks for document presentation. The gold standard for report styling in Computer Science is the AI conference NeurIPS and they kindly produce a style guide which I would strongly recommend you follow. So, if you want easy (free!) marks on your dissertations, read on!

Figures

You should have a range of figures in your dissertations, ranging from architectural diagrams, results charts, screenshots, all the way to qualitative results. Figures should have accompanying captions that appear below the figure. Do not be afraid of having detailed figure captions, remember that some people read through the figures (and their captions) prior to reading papers/dissertations. If you have text in your figures, then it should be clearly legible at 100% zoom and any mathematics should be correctly typesetted. Do not be afraid to use colour to group elements together.

A figure

Tables

Results tables are going to be the main way in which you present your results, especially for deep learning and data science projects. Tables should have a caption that appears above the table contents and should not have any vertical lines. A nice touch is to include up/down arrows to indicate whether higher/lower is better. It is also common practice to put the best results in bold. See Section 4.4 from the style guide for tables and below for an example of a beautiful table.

A table

Other Tips and Tricks

  1. Use British English spelling (we are at a UK university after all!).
  2. If you are using Word, make sure to use the built-in headings and title functionality as it will enable you to generate a table of contents.
  3. Remember to justify your margins (if the last line of a paragraph goes funny, left align the last line).
  4. Ensure you are using an appropriate font: Calibri, Arial, Times New Roman etc. Remember to typeset any inline code using a monospace font.
  5. Ensure that any mathematics are correctly typesetted using Word’s equation system.