14-08-2012, 04:10 PM
General Guidelines for Documents
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Introduction
Since generations, students are writing preseminar papers, seminar papers, and eventually
diploma or master theses. For most students, such seminar papers are the first documents they
write – apart from some shorter documents in school. On this reason, supervisors of seminars
have to give the same comments about writing style, formatting, literature, etc again and
again.
This paper should serve as a guideline for students, helping them in writing seminar papers.
To do so, chapter 2 starts with some guidelines about the style of the document. This includes
as well formatting of seminar papers as comments on orthography and the embedding of
figures and tables. Afterwards, chapter 3 has a closer look to the structuring and presentation
of contents. This chapter gives an overview of general rules how to structure a paper, which
contents to consider, and which parts are necessary to be included. Also, it is stated which
formulations should be used and which should not. Comments on how to include literature in
the seminar paper follow in chapter 4, together with some remarks on literature study. Chapter
5 is the most important one – it summarizes DOs and DON’Ts for seminarists. At the end,
chapter 6 concludes the paper and gives a look onto future trends in seminar papers and
presentations.
Document Format
Not only content, also the presentation of material is important. On this reason, this chapter
gives an overview how to format the paper in a way that others feel comfortable in reading.
General Guidelines for Documents
Use DIN A4 paper format, and usual borders like 2,54cm on all sides. Text should be in
Times New Roman (or a similar font), 12pt. Some prefer Arial font type – if you do so, use a
font size of 11pt. But in general opinion, Arial is better for presentation slides, but Times New
Roman is better for longer texts. Use blocked text alignment (i.e. alignment to left and right),
and as in this document, use a spacing between the lines which is a bit larger then 1 line (the
author prefers 1.2 lines spacing). Also, the document looks nicer when there is an additional
spacing between the paragraphs.
Specific Guidelines for a Seminar Paper
The seminar paper starts with a title page which includes:
• A header of the institution supervising the seminar (i4),
• Title of the seminar topic,
• Name and semester of the seminar,
Document Format
• Name and matriculation number of the writer, and
• Name of the supervisor.
The title page is followed by a blank page – on the simple reason that it looks better when the
back of the title page is empty when printed duplex.
After that, there is to be included a table of contents. Depending on the extent of the topic, it
maybe fits on one page, or it needs several pages. If the table of contents has an odd number
of pages, add an empty page behind it, as for the title page. If the table of contents has more
than one page, add a page header, starting on the second page of the table of contents.
After the table of contents, the contents start. Note that only with chapter one, the pages are
numbered, starting with page number 1. I.e. add a page header to all pages, containing at least
the page number. It looks better if the numbers are on different sides of the page for odd and
even numbers (as shown in this document’s header). If you also had to add a header to the
table of contents, it is numbered separately; usually, small roman numbers (i, ii, iii, …) are
used.
At the end of the document, after the content chapters, a list of the used literature is to be
appended. Some people also add a table of figures or a list of abbreviations, but in the
author’s opinion, this is unsuitable for such short documents like seminar papers.
Readability
It helps the reader in understanding your text, when core statements are emphasized by using
an italic or bold style. In the author’s opinion, italic is the better choice. Some professors say
that in each paragraph there should be emphasized words in a form that with only one look
one is able to catch the statement of the paragraph by only reading the italic words. But often,
it is enough to emphasize the real important words in the chapters.
A very important point to mention here is orthography and grammar. Often students are
delivering seminar papers which are completely confusing because of spelling or grammar
mistakes. Those who are not good in these things should give the seminar paper a friend for
making corrections. It is not the task of the supervisor to mark such errors; it is simply not
acceptable to deliver a work full of mistakes!
Concluding Remarks on Document Format
A good presentation of the seminar paper is an important part of the work; and it will be
important also for later works, e.g. diploma thesis (even if for such a thesis the guidelines are
a bit different). Think about a document style before starting to write your document,
especially if you plan to use something like Microsoft Word for writing.