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The Art Of Writing

How to write reports, CVs, cover letter, the proper way, with the most perfectly suited tool, LaTeX.

🕒 7 min read

Category: Miscellaneous

Tags: writing, english, latex, cv, resume, cover letter, report

Writing any kind of profesionnal document in English is not a straightforward thing, especially if it's not something you do on a regular basis. There are rules to stick to, a formatting to respect, mistakes to avoid. Readers must be able to find information quickly, at the right place. Might it be either in a glossary, a footnote, an appendix, and so on., you must follow a specific order.

This year, I decided to write my internship report in English and thus stick to what English readers are used to. In general, thoses rules are almost the same as in French, almost. However, there are a few significant differences you'd better know.

I'm going to first explain how I would write a technical report — it works for an internship report as well, since it's supposed to be technical.

Writing a report

I decided to base my report on a book design. However, you can find here a complete guide about profesionnal and technical writing.

The report is done in a two-sided printing style. Here is the plan I would follow for an internship or a technical report:

Do you need a glossary? I will mostly depends on your audience. Glossaries are meant to define complex or unsual words. Glossaries should also contain the definitions of any acronym used. One rule of thumb is pretty simple: who is your audience? Who will read your report. If the answer is people like you, who have the same knowledge, and who will likely understand the report well, then no need for a glossary. On the contrary, if it's intended to be read by anyone, then you likely need a glossary.

An index is mostly encountered within novels but you might add it in the glossary (add the page numbers after the definitions). It's generally not mandatory at all.

Footnotes are rather different. There are meant to add short pieces of information not necessarly related to the main content (like anecdotes, complementary information, web links). In regular books, you might encounter notes at the end of them, which purpose is approximatively the same. However, it's a bit annoying, as it interrupts the flow of reading. It's better suited for long footnotes that wouldn't fit at the bottom of a page. Personally, I don't write notes at the end of a document, I would rather write footnotes. And sometimes, when footnotes are extremely short, you might want to use either a dash or a semicolon to add complementary information.

Appendices are for any other document you haven't produced yourself, or big ones, like charts, graphs or emails. They should not be an important part, the reader must be able to understand your point without seeing the appendix. Otherwise, it must go in the main content.

Pay attention to headings, there are different rules regarding capitalization.

Writing a formal business letter

Using modern tools

There are great tools out there to write beautiful reports, not to mention Microsoft Word, Pages or LibreOffice Writer. But these ones are too focused on the form instead of the content. People spend way too much time formatting, adding colors, setting the margins, and so forth, instead of... writing the actual content. Moreover, between two given versions of the same program (let's say Word 2003 and Word 2007), there might be huge differences introducing compatibility issues, not easily solvable.

So, is there some sort of an ultimate solution? The answer is YES. Let me introduce LaTeX.

LaTeX

Basically and quickly, it's an open source tool written a while ago which allows you to write any kind of document and export them as PDF (and some other formats). You can write books, reports, CVs, slides, anything! You write it as plain text surrounded with some sort of code (it's a markup language actually). It's available on Linux, Mac and Windows. As it's plain old text, there's no compatibility issue at all. What is more, LaTeX doesn't evolve that much over years so. Should it does some day, they will always ensure backward compatibility. When you're done with it, you just compile it and you're good: a beautiful PDF is procuded. There are plenty of tools available for each platform. For instance, I recommend pdflatex on Linux. And if you're too lazy to install any of them, use ShareLaTeX.

See this tutorial to install the latest version of LaTeX.. Otherwise, you might install it using your system package manager:

sudo aptitude install texlive-full biber # biber is for the bibliography

Then, make sure LaTeX's package manager is working:

sudo aptitude install xzdec
tlmgr init-usertree
tlmgr update --list

In the following lines, I will give some pieces of advice regarding LaTeX and how to use it properly but I will assume you already have some knowledge about it. My purpose is not to write a tutorial about LaTeX at all. These are mainly reminders for myself.

You can find some examples of CVs, cover letters, reports and slideshows on my GitHub account. For advice about CVs, see my article "How Not To Get Hired"

The commands \input{} and \include{}

\input{} doesn't do \newpage, unlike \include{}. More info.

Splitting files

Is a best practice. I personally try to have "conf" files and "content" files. Then I gather them in the main Tex file (thanks to \input{}), which will be compiled eventually.

Bibliography

It's a really important part of any report or publication. Basically, there are two engines to compile the ".bib" file: bibtex and biber. As well, there are two LaTeX packages to format citations and bibliographies: natbib and biblatex. I personally recommend using biber and biblatex. Read here why..

Going further with LaTeX

Unix tools

Now that you started using LaTeX (I'm glad you did!), you might wonder how to check spelling, grammar, conjugation, etc.? Actually, there are dozens of tools for Linux.

Grammar and style

Here are two old fashionned tools to check grammar and style, installable with

sudo apt-get install diction

diction and style are both great tools but don't trust them completely, they tend to be really strict.

Spelling

There are three main tools really wide spread among the Linux community

They mostly do the same job. However, I would rather recommand aspell as it's the preferred tool for programmers (source).

aspell -l en-US -c -t <file.tex>

General tools

TextLint

Another awesome tool to check the style, mostly.

git clone https://github.com/DamienCassou/textlint
cd textlint
./textlint.bash \
    <file.tex> \
    ./Linux32/pharo \
    ./TextLint.tmbundle/Support/TextLint.image

They also offer a web application.

LanguageTool

Finally, here is a general word/grammer checker (probably one of the best): languagetool.org. According to their official documentation regarding LaTeX, the best way to check any file is as follows. You will need Java version 8 or higher.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:openjdk-r/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install openjdk-8-jdk
sudo update-alternatives --config java
sudo update-alternatives --config javac
java -version # Make sure it worked

Now, download languagetool (stand-alone version for Desktop). Then:

detex <file.tex> |java -jar languagetool-commandline.jar -l en-US -c UTF-8 |less

detex will turn your Tex file into a plain text one (it will remove the LaTeX formatting). You can disable rules. Simply add the argument -d with the rules' IDs (as many as you want), for example:

java -jar languagetool-commandline.jar -l en-US -c UTF-8 -d 'EN_QUOTES,UPPERCASE_SENTENCE_START' <file.tex>

Books

To conclude, here a two famous books to produce high-quality documents in English:

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