Generic Paper Outline
This is a generic outline which is an effective general structure for
any technical paper, thesis proposal, or thesis. Obviously the
specific points and emphasis will change with the purpose of the
document and the target audience.
I. Introduction
- What is the problem
- Why is it not already solved or other
solutions are inferior in one or more important ways
- Why is our solution worth considering and why
is it superior in some way
- How the rest of the paper is structured
II. Related Work
- What other efforts to solve this problem
exist and why do they solve it less well than we do
- What other efforts to solve related problems
exist which are relevant to our effort, and why are they
less good than our solution for this problem
III. Implementation
- What we (will do, did): Our Solution
- How our solution works
IV. Evaluation
- How we tested our solution
- How our solution performed and how this
performance compared to that of other
solutions
- Why, how, and to what degree our solution is
better than other solutions
- Why you should be impressed with our solution
to the problem
V. Conclusion and Future Work
- What is the problem
- What is our solution to the problem
- Why our solution is better
- Why you should be impressed
- What we will do next to:
- improve our solution
- apply our solution to harder versions
of this problem
- solve related problems with this
solution or a realted solution
Steve Goddard
Last modified: Fri Jan 15 11:00:23 CST 1999