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Topos Uranos
English

Final review of LaTeX for Academic Writing

Summary

This entry is not one more lesson, but the final account of the course: it recalls the seven learning objectives that the syllabus set at the outset, shows in a single figure to which of them each lesson of each unit was assigned, explains how each objective was worked on across the seven units, points out what the course leaves to the writing courses built on it, and teaches how to read the self-assessment by objective, which gathers the first attempt at the exit assessments of the units.

Learning objectives

  1. State the seven global objectives of the course and recognise in which units and lessons each one was worked on.
  2. Distinguish the objectives that have a unit of their own from those that run through several, and explain how the latter are exercised.
  3. Distinguish what the course taught, the typesetting of academic documents, from what it leaves to the writing courses of each discipline.
  4. Decide, from the self-assessment by objective, the figure and the challenges of each synthesis, which units and which lessons are worth reviewing.

What the course set out to do

Every course on the site requires writing proofs, solutions, reports and essays, but none teaches the tool with which those texts are typeset in academia. The course was therefore born with a general aim: that whoever completes it should know how to typeset with LaTeX, in any discipline, the complete piece of academic work, from the empty file to the document its destination accepts, with the text in its languages, the structure of a long document, the formulas, the tables, the figures and the bibliography. The lesson on the syllabus unfolded that aim into seven global learning objectives, which should be kept in view with the numbering by which the figure cites them:

  1. Produce and compile documents, diagnosing and correcting their errors.
  2. Typeset text correctly in several languages and alphabets.
  3. Structure long documents with internal references.
  4. Write mathematics and logic with correct notation.
  5. Present readable tables and figures.
  6. Manage the bibliography and cite according to the convention of each discipline.
  7. Choose the document class suited to each academic genre.

Each lesson of the course also stated its own specific objectives. The lessons do not say which global objective each one serves; that correspondence is a reading made from outside, with the same method as in the Algebra and Geometry courses. Each specific objective is assigned to a main global objective and, if it touches them, to other secondary ones; each counts in full towards its main objective and by half towards each secondary one, and the lesson is joined as main to the global objective that gathers the most weight and as secondary to the others that receive some. The introductions follow the same rule. The syntheses, on the other hand, follow a criterion of their own: their main objective is that of their unit, because their chain, their exit assessment and most of their challenges gather what the unit taught, and their secondary objectives are the others that their six challenges exercise. If this is so, the whole course takes the form of a spine: the head is the general aim; the column, the order of the units, each with its segment; each lesson is a node of that segment, joined to its main objective, and the seven objectives float around the column, held up by the lessons that feed them.