PPLS Skills Centre

The PPLS Skills Centre is available to all students on any PPLS course. You do not need to be a PPLS student. This is a free service and you are very strongly encouraged to take full advantage of it.

They can help you improve your academic skills, and especially your writing skills. Book appointments with their tutors on the website, and take the following information to your appointment (or share it with your tutor in advance).

Advice for PPLS Skills Centre tutors for the Speech Synthesis coursework

This course is a little different to most other PPLS courses, and so is the coursework required. For both UG and PG students, there is a single, semester-long practical assignment. They will write up a report on this work, following specific guidelines.

Very importantly, PPLS Skills Centre tutors do not need to understand the technical course content. Any tutor should be able to provide valuable help to students on this course, to help them with their scientific writing.

Do focus on:

• structure
  • we want a clear global structure using meaningful section and subsection headings, and figures and tables with descriptive captions
  • we do not want only text
  • we also want strong local structure (e.g., ordering the sentences within a paragraph, or ordering material within a sentence)
• clarity
  • this is a scientific report which communicates directly to the reader
    • it is not an essay
    • we do not want the writing to “get in the way”
  • we want short, simple, clear sentences
    • we do not want convoluted grammar or over-complex constructions
    • we are not trying to impress the reader with complex writing, vocabulary, grammar
    • but the writing can still be enjoyable to read! good scientific writing is not “dry” or “boring”!
  • we want consistent terminology (even if you don’t understand it) and no ambiguity
    • we do not want to see multiple terms being used to refer to the same thing: throw away the thesaurus!
• presentation
  • the report must follow a particular journal style: there are examples on this page.
  • since scientific writing is about communicating ideas to the reader, presentation matters; look out for
    • following the correct style for headings, two-column layout, citation style
    • clear figures and plots
    • well-formatted bibliography

Don’t worry if:

• you don’t understand all the technical terms in the report: a well-written report will still be readable by a non-expert
• the plots and figures don’t make complete sense: you can still judge if they are drawn carefully, have descriptive captions, keys, labelled axes, and so on