Syllabus of LaTeX for Academic Writing

Purpose

Every course on the site requires writing: proofs and solutions in mathematics and physics, reports in engineering and computing, essays and commentaries in philosophy, papers with tables and graphs in economics. None of them, however, teaches the tool with which those texts are typeset in academia. If this is so, a LaTeX course is not a side addition to the study of a discipline, but the common foundation on which the others rest, in the sciences as much as in the humanities; it is therefore transversal: it belongs not to one programme, but to all of them.

The course does not teach the style of academic writing, which is the subject of other courses, but the typesetting of its documents: how a LaTeX source is written, compiled and corrected; how text is typeset in several languages and scripts, with its notes, its quotations and its verse; how a long document is given an architecture of numbered parts that refer to one another; how mathematics and logic are written with the correct notation; how tables, images and drawings are presented; how a bibliography is managed and sources are cited according to the convention of each discipline; and how the other genres through which academics communicate their work are typeset: the presentation, the poster, the letter, the curriculum vitae, the document written as a team and the one submitted to a journal or a repository. Its guiding principle is that of LaTeX itself: to separate what a passage is from how it should look, so that the author attends to the content and the typesetting is left to the program.

The whole course works with LuaLaTeX, with the babel and fontspec packages, which make it possible to write any language and any script directly; with Texmaker as the local editor, because it works the same way on every operating system; and with Overleaf as the online alternative. The examples are neutral across disciplines: one and the same procedure is illustrated with a chemistry report, a philosophy essay, a passage from Cicero or a theorem, because what changes from one discipline to another is what is written, not the way it is typeset.

Intended students and prior knowledge

The course is intended for anyone beginning any of the site's programmes of study, and also for anyone who, at any stage of their education or work, needs to typeset academic documents: students preparing reports, dissertations or theses, teachers writing study guides and articles, and researchers who are new to LaTeX or who have always used it by imitation, without knowing why what works works.

The course starts from almost nothing. It assumes no previous use of LaTeX, no programming and no mathematics. The engine's messages are in English, and every message the course presents is explained, so that they need not be met unprepared. It assumes only the ordinary handling of a computer: creating a folder, saving a file with a given name in a given folder, finding it again later, copying, moving and deleting files, and installing a program, or else having a browser and an Overleaf account. Those who do not write mathematics may go through unit 4 with less attention to its formulas, but should not skip it: its lesson on logic serves philosophy as much as computing, and the environments for statements are also used for definitions, theses and cases.

Where it leads

From the above follows the place of the course on the site. It has no prerequisites and is part of every programme of study (Physics, Mathematics, Engineering, Informatics, Philosophy and Economics), in each of which the planner places it first, because any other course is studied better when its solutions and assignments can be written with it. Those who study Algebra and Geometry I or Mathematical Logic I: Propositional Logic in parallel will find in unit 4 the way to write their proofs, their truth tables and their deduction trees with the same precision with which they are thought.

Now, the course is also the gateway to a series of writing courses that the site will offer later, all of which will require it as a prerequisite: a course in scientific writing and another in humanistic and philosophical writing, general in scope and unnumbered, because they do not form a sequence, and the writing courses specific to each programme, such as technical writing, laboratory reports, research articles and the thesis proposal. This course teaches how to typeset the document; those will teach how to build the text the document contains.

Global learning objectives

The following objectives describe what a student who completes the course should be able to do. Each is formulated as an observable performance, so that it can be checked with a concrete task; each content lesson, in turn, states its own objectives, which serve one or more of the global ones, and the closing lesson shows in which units and lessons each one is worked on. The seven objectives are numbered so that they can be cited.

1. Objective 1. Produce and compile documents, diagnosing and correcting their errors: write a source from an empty file, compile it with LuaLaTeX, read the log, distinguish an error from a warning and get from the engine's message to its cause.
2. Objective 2. Typeset text correctly in several languages and alphabets: paragraphs, spaces, quotation marks, dashes and hyphens; languages declared with babel and fonts chosen with fontspec, including Greek and Latin; formatting that expresses the function of each passage; and notes, quotations and verse.
3. Objective 3. Structure long documents with internal references: choose the class and the page layout, divide into sections with their table of contents and their appendices, cross-refer without ever writing a number by hand, split a thesis or a book into several files and assemble a preamble of one’s own.
4. Objective 4. Write mathematics and logic with correct notation: inline and displayed formulas, symbols and alphabets with the convention they express, multi-line equations, theorems and proofs declared as environments, and connectives, truth tables and deductions.
5. Objective 5. Present readable tables and figures: tables without a grid, with rules and numerical alignment, tables that break across pages, images of relative size, numbered floating elements and drawings made with TikZ within the document itself.
6. Objective 6. Manage the bibliography and cite according to the convention of each discipline: build a bibliographic database, cite with BibLaTeX in author–year and numeric styles, cite in notes in the manner of the humanities, and compile subject indexes and glossaries.
7. Objective 7. Choose the document class suited to each academic genre: the article, the report, the thesis and the book, but also the presentation, the poster, the letter and the curriculum vitae, the document written as a team and the one adapted to a journal’s template or prepared for a repository.

In essence, each objective corresponds to one unit, in the same order. Now, the first is also transversal: every example compiled and every error corrected, in any unit, exercises it, and the achievement of all the others depends on it. The seventh, for its part, is prepared from unit 3, which compares the document classes, and completed in unit 7, which carries what has been learned over to the remaining genres.

Contents

The course is organised in seven units, framed by this lesson and by a closing one. Each unit opens with an introduction lesson, which presents its lessons, the problem the unit solves and what it takes for granted, and closes with a synthesis lesson, which reconstructs the chain of principles and mechanisms of the unit, links it to the rest of the course and sets six challenges harder than the problems of the lessons.

Unit 0. Course overview

It consists of this lesson, which sets out the purpose, the global objectives, the contents, the workload and the design of the course.

Unit 1. First steps

Its objective is to take someone who has never used LaTeX to the point of writing, compiling and correcting a short document on their own.

1. First steps: introduction.
2. What LaTeX is: typesetting, the markup language as opposed to the word processor, and the origin of TeX and LaTeX.
3. The working environment: the TeX distribution for each system, Texmaker with LuaLaTeX as the compiler, and Overleaf.
4. Anatomy of a document: the preamble and the body, commands with their arguments, groups and environments.
5. Compiling and fixing errors: the passes of compilation, latexmk, reading the log and a debugging strategy.
6. First steps: synthesis and challenges.

Unit 2. The text

Its objective is to move from a document that compiles to a text typeset with the care that academic writing demands, in any of its languages and scripts.

1. The text: introduction.
2. Paragraphs, spaces and punctuation: the paragraph and the line break, spaces, quotation marks, dashes and reserved characters.
3. Languages and fonts: babel and its language switches, polytonic Greek and Latin, and the choice of fonts with fontspec.
4. Formatting with meaning: logical as opposed to visual markup, emphasis, and the families, series, shapes and sizes of type.
5. Notes, quotations and verse: footnotes, short and long quotations, and the typesetting of verse.
6. The text: synthesis and challenges.

Unit 3. Document structure

Its objective is to give a long document an architecture of its own, whose parts are numbered, listed in a table of contents, refer to one another and are spread over several files.

1. Document structure: introduction.
2. Document classes and page layout: the standard classes and those of KOMA-Script, and the design of the page.
3. Sections, table of contents and appendices: the title, the abstract, the levels of division, the table of contents, the lists and the appendices.
4. Cross-references: labels, their correct placement and automatic reference to sections, figures and equations.
5. Long documents: splitting a thesis or a book into several files with \input and \include.
6. Macros and a preamble of one’s own: one’s own commands and environments, and a reusable preamble.
7. Document structure: synthesis and challenges.

Unit 4. Mathematics and logic

Its objective is to fill that architecture with formulas, equations, statements and deductions typeset with the same precision with which they are thought.

1. Mathematics and logic: introduction.
2. Inline and displayed formulas: math mode, what changes in it, and when a formula goes in the paragraph or outside it.
3. Symbols and notation: subscripts and superscripts, fractions, roots, Greek letters, mathematical alphabets, operators and delimiters.
4. Multi-line equations: the environments of amsmath and mathtools, their alignment and their numbering.
5. Theorems and proofs: statements declared with amsthm, their numbering and their styles.
6. Logic and deductions: connectives and quantifiers, truth tables, natural deduction trees, Fitch boxes and arguments in standard form.
7. Mathematics and logic: synthesis and challenges.

Unit 5. Tables and figures

Its objective is to typeset data, images and drawings so that they read with the clarity of the text, are numbered and referred to like sections, and find their place on the page without the author fixing it by hand.

1. Tables and figures: introduction.
2. Readable tables: the tabular environment, the rules of booktabs instead of the grid, and the alignment of figures.
3. Complex and long tables: cells merged across and down, fixed-width tables and tables that break across pages.
4. Images in the document: graphicx, relative size, rotation, clipping and file formats.
5. Figures and floating tables: floating environments, their placement specifiers, their captions and references to them.
6. Drawings with TikZ: coordinates, paths, nodes and styles, diagrams, trees and graphs of functions.
7. Tables and figures: synthesis and challenges.

Unit 6. Bibliography and indexes

Its objective is to cite sources from a bibliographic database, so that the citations and the list of references are typeset by themselves in the style of each discipline, and to make the document searchable with indexes and glossaries.

1. Bibliography and indexes: introduction.
2. The bibliographic database: the .bib file, its entries and fields, and its relation to a reference manager such as Zotero.
3. Citing with BibLaTeX: the cycle with Biber, the citation commands, and the author–year and numeric styles.
4. Citing in the humanities: citation in notes, its Latin abbreviations and the styles that automate it.
5. Indexes and glossaries: the subject index with its subentries and cross-references, several indexes at once, and glossaries.
6. Bibliography and indexes: synthesis and challenges.

Unit 7. Other documents and teamwork

Its objective is to carry what has been learned over to the other academic genres, to the document that several authors write at once and to the one submitted to a journal or a repository.

1. Other documents and teamwork: introduction.
2. Presentations with Beamer: the frame, themes, overlays and the academic talk.
3. Posters, letters and curriculum vitae: the poster with tcolorbox, the formal letter and the academic curriculum vitae with its list of publications.
4. Writing as a team: shared Overleaf, the minimal Git workflow, a team’s conventions and latexdiff.
5. Templates and publication: journal classes, submission to arXiv, long-term archiving and licences.
6. Other documents and teamwork: synthesis and challenges, whose last challenge brings the whole course together in a complete academic article.

Course closing

It consists of the lesson Final review of LaTeX for Academic Writing, which recalls the seven global objectives, shows in which units and lessons each one is worked on, gathers by objective the first attempt at the exit assessments and points to where study continues.

Workload and credits

The workload of a course is not measured by contact hours, which do not exist in an asynchronous course, but by the student’s total work: reading, reproducing the examples, solving problems and reviewing. The estimate follows the same method in every course on the site: it counts the reading time of the text of each lesson, including the code of its examples, at one hundred words per minute, twenty minutes per solved problem, thirty-five per proposed problem, forty-five per challenge and twelve per entry or exit assessment, and adds a margin of one tenth for review.

Results

The lessons of the course contain in all $93$ solved problems, $93$ proposed problems and $42$ challenges, as well as fourteen unit assessments. The estimated workload per unit, rounded to the hour, is as follows:

• Unit 0, course overview: less than $1$ hour.
• Unit 1, first steps: $20$ hours.
• Unit 2, the text: $21$ hours.
• Unit 3, document structure: $24$ hours.
• Unit 4, mathematics and logic: $25$ hours.
• Unit 5, tables and figures: $26$ hours.
• Unit 6, bibliography and indexes: $21$ hours.
• Unit 7, other documents and teamwork: $22$ hours.
• Course closing: less than $1$ hour.

The total is about $160$ hours of student work. This figure should be read for what it is: an estimate for a student who reproduces every example and solves every problem and challenge. Those who have already used LaTeX, or who limit themselves to the proposed problems without tackling the challenges, will need considerably less; those who have never installed a program or read an error message may need more, above all in the first unit.

Now, the figure is nominal: it is the one that sets the credits of the course, and it assumes reading at a constant pace and three quarters of an hour per challenge. Until it is measured with real students, it should be accompanied by a realistic range. If reading proceeded at half the assumed pace, as happens when each example is typed and compiled in one’s own editor, and each challenge required seventy-five minutes instead of forty-five, the same method would give about $211$ hours. Therefore, the workload to be expected lies between about $160$ and about $210$ hours. The upper end is a prudent bound, not a measurement; the range will be corrected once the time spent by those who study the course is known, and until then the credits are calculated with the nominal figure.

Suggested pace

To name the paces, this plan uses the same criterion as the site’s other plans: full-time study is that of an academic year of $60$ credits, about $1650$ hours spread over some forty weeks, that is, about $40$ hours a week, and half-time is half of that, about $20$ hours a week. From this follows a recommended pace of one sixteen-week semester, with about $10$ hours of study a week, a quarter of full-time study; with the realistic range, from $10$ to $13$ hours a week. Since the planner places the course first in every programme, that semester is normally the first, and the course shares it with the first courses of the discipline, which it serves from the first week: by the end of units 1 and 2, about $41$ hours, the student can already typeset their solutions and assignments in LaTeX.

An intensive pace, of about $20$ hours a week, that is, half-time, completes the course in eight weeks, and suits those who want to master it before beginning the other courses of the programme. A more relaxed pace, of about $5$ hours a week, stretches it over two semesters; in that case it is advisable not to delay units 1 to 3, which are the ones most needed at the outset, and to leave for the second semester units 5 to 7, which can be studied as the other courses call for tables, figures, bibliography or presentations.

Equivalence in transferable credits

Transferable credit systems measure a course by the total work it requires of the student, not by the hours of classroom teaching, so that studies completed at one institution can be recognised at another. The European Credit Transfer and Accumulation System, adopted by European universities following the Bologna Declaration, assigns $60$ credits to a full-time academic year and sets each credit at between $25$ and $30$ hours of work. The Chilean Transferable Credit System, adopted by Chilean universities with an analogous design, likewise assigns $60$ credits to the academic year and sets each credit at between $24$ and $31$ hours of work.

Now, dividing the estimated $160$ hours by the ends of each interval, the course is equivalent to between $5$ and $6$ European credits, approximately (from 5.3 to 6.4), and to between $5$ and $7$ Chilean transferable credits (from 5.2 to 6.7). Taking as reference the central value of both intervals, 27.5 hours per credit, both systems give the same number, 5.8, which is rounded to 6. For European credits, the number $C$ of credits is bounded as follows:

Therefore, it is recommended that the course be assigned $6$ European credits and $6$ Chilean transferable credits, that is, one tenth of a full-time academic year, which corresponds to an ordinary one-semester subject.

Course design

Mode of study

The course is asynchronous, online and self-paced: it has no dates, live sessions or deadlines, and each student progresses at the speed that their preparation and their time allow. It is offered in the site’s fourteen languages; in each version, the texts of the examples are written in the language of that version, because typesetting each language well is part of what the course teaches. The lessons state which other lessons should be studied first, so that the recommended order is explicit.

The structure of a lesson

All content lessons follow the same structure. They begin with a summary and a list of their own learning objectives, formulated as observable performances. Then comes the exposition, whose core is the code examples: each shows the source, with line numbers and a button to copy it, next to the compiled result on white paper, so that it is immediately clear what each command produces. Other blocks show only the source, when it is an error or an auxiliary file, terminal commands or real extracts from the compilation log, with their error lines highlighted. The lesson closes with three solved problems, with their solution, and three proposed problems, each with a folded hint and, after it, the answer, so that the student can check their result without being shown the way.

Introduction and synthesis lessons have a structure of their own. The introduction presents the unit, its lessons and the thread that joins them, what it takes for granted and the problem it solves, and contains the entry assessment. The synthesis reconstructs the chain of principles and mechanisms of the unit, with the lesson in which each link is established and what each one uses, links it to the preceding and following units, contains the exit assessment and sets six challenges, each with a hint, an answer and a folded worked solution, which combine several lessons and demand more invention than the proposed problems.

The voice reader

Each lesson can be listened to aloud with the site’s reader, which uses the device’s own voices: the text is read as written, the commands quoted in it are pronounced meaningfully and the code blocks are announced, without being read character by character. This makes it possible to review the exposition away from the screen; the examples, on the other hand, always call for the editor.

Assessment

The course does not grade: its assessment is formative and rests on self-assessment. The proposed problems make it possible to check the achievement of the objectives of each lesson, and the challenges, that of the objectives of each unit; in all of them the final judge is the engine itself, because a document that compiles without errors or warnings and produces what was asked for is a proof that admits no dispute.

To this are added the unit assessments. The entry assessment, in the introduction, is a short self-assessment of eight to twelve questions that measures the starting point; the exit assessment, in the synthesis and before the challenges, measures what has been achieved and is compared with the entry assessment. Both are corrected in the browser itself: each answer receives an explanation, each typical error a remark that identifies it, and each question refers to the lesson worth reviewing. Neither of them grades or certifies, and their results are stored only in the student’s browser; the validation of the skills acquired will be carried out later on another platform. All seven units include both assessments, and the final review gathers the first attempt at each exit assessment into a profile by global objective. The lessons also include short exercises that the site checks instantly, with the same character of feedback.

For the global objectives, the following evidence of achievement is suggested:

• Objective 1: receive a source with several errors, compile it and correct it guided only by the log, until it compiles without errors or warnings.
• Objective 2: typeset a text with a passage in Greek or Latin, footnotes, a long quotation and a poem, with the quotation marks, dashes and spaces of English.
• Objective 3: divide a short thesis into a main file and several chapters, with a table of contents, appendices and cross-references that survive any reordering.
• Objective 4: transcribe a page of notes with aligned equations, a theorem with its proof and a deduction in tree or box form.
• Objective 5: present some data in a table with rules and aligned figures, and a diagram drawn with TikZ, both floating, numbered and referred to from the text.
• Objective 6: cite one and the same set of works in author–year style and in note style, changing only the preamble, and add an index of names.
• Objective 7: typeset a complete article, the presentation that sets it out and the poster that summarises it, from a single base and with the class suited to each.

How to study this course

The course is designed to be studied in order. Each unit presupposes the previous ones, and many examples reuse the preamble and the conventions of earlier lessons; skipping a lesson means, sooner or later, going back to it.

The main rule is a single one: compile every example. LaTeX is not learned by reading, but by writing and compiling, and for that reason the student reproduces each example in their own Texmaker, which the lesson The working environment teaches how to install and configure; those who cannot install a TeX distribution have Overleaf, which compiles in the browser with a free account. The site does not compile the student’s code: it shows the expected result, and it is the student who obtains it in their editor. In the first units it is advisable to type the examples by hand instead of copying them, because the hand retains what the eye overlooks; and, once an example compiles, it is advisable to alter it on purpose (delete a brace, change an option, move a command into the body) and read what the log says, because every error provoked is an error that will be recognised later.

Each unit has two checkpoints. The entry assessment, in the introduction, is the starting point: it should be answered before studying the unit, without consulting anything, noting the lessons to which the errors refer. The exit assessment, in the synthesis and before the challenges, is the contrast: it is answered on finishing the lessons, also without consulting anything, and compared with the entry assessment. In both, the first attempt is what counts, since it is the one that is compared and the one that the profile of the final review gathers. It follows that those who believe they have already mastered a unit should not decide so on the strength of a single test: if their exit assessment is solid and they solve the challenges of the synthesis in their editor, they can move on to the next; if not, they should go through the lessons that the one and the others point to.

In the proposed problems and the challenges, the hint should be opened only when one’s own attempt is exhausted, and the answer only at the end, to check. A problem whose answer was consulted before compiling one’s own has not been solved, but read. Finally, it is advisable to use what has been learned outside the course from the first day: writing in LaTeX the notes, solutions and assignments of the other courses is the practice that turns into habit what the course teaches, and it is also the purpose for which it was conceived.