What is written with ease is never read with pleasure.

-- Samuel Johnson

If you are used to whipping off papers the night before they're due, running them quickly through the computer's Spellchecker, handing them in full of high-school errors and sentences that make no sense and having the professor accept them 'because the ideas are good' or something, please be informed that I draw no distinction between the quality of one's ideas and the quality of those ideas' verbal expression, and I will not accept sloppy, rough-draftish, or semiliterate college writing. Again, I am absolutely not kidding.

-- David Foster Wallace

173 Writing and Math Resources

For mathematical answers you should know how to write mathematics. For that, you can see the Math Preliminaries reference below.

The examples of 173 project writeups are not bad and give you the idea, but you can always improve on them (especially with references!)

• The College Writing Center. Expertise at all levels.
• Project Writeup and Proposal Checklist Condensed guidelines for what we look for in project writeups and proposals.
• Exercise How-To (pdf). These are pretty long-winded and explicit, but interesting to look at good to emulate as much as possible.
• Guidelines for a term paper or technical report. Pretty long-winded.
• CB's Classic Pet Writing Peeves:
  • CB's Peeves PDF.
  • Modern Peeves and Perps .
• The Economist Style Guide. Great Stuff!
• How good is your paper? Will it get read? (pdf) One-page summary of tough questions from a how-to-write paper that is almost certainly NOT still on reserve, but the questions are enough.
• A theoretical CS (mostly) Cheat-sheet (pdf) .
• Math Preliminaries for Data Structures.
• Exercises and Answers for Math Preliminaries above.
• Math Preliminaries for Analysis of Algorithms.