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MSOE Documentation and Style Guides

The following guides provide students with the standards for documenting sources and preparing research reports at MSOE. Your instructor will inform you as to which guide you should be using. In all the cases, the individual guides provide students with important information on how to successfully research and prepare research reports.

If you are unfamiliar with documentation or need to refresh your knowledge about it, you may want to visit www.msoe.edu/library/start for a comprehensive review of research and documentation.

MSEM students should also consult the MSEM Research and Writing Guidelines, which can be found at: www.msoe.edu/business/msem/guidelines/

Undergraduate Documentation and Style Guide

This is “How-To” information concerning a number of topics associated with the writing of undergraduate papers and reports at MSOE. It includes the standard formats to follow for documenting sources and provides specific examples covering the most common research sources. It also includes guidelines for writing, such as common grammar and punctuation issues, formatting requirements for reports, copyright and plagiarism issues, and common documentation errors to avoid.

MSOE Undergraduate Documentation and Style Guide [pdf]

Graduate Documentation and Style Guides

The Milwaukee School of Engineering officially endorses a suite of documentation and style standards that instruct students on how to document and how to organize theses and the reports on capstone projects which are required in the following graduate programs: the Master of Science in Engineering Management (MSEM) program; the Master of Science in Engineering (MSE) program; the Master of Science in Environmental Engineering (MSEV) program; and the Master of Science in Structural Engineering (MSST) program. The suite of standards features two separate documentation and style standards, or guides. The guides overall are based on the same standard bibliographic style, but after the general style is explained, each guide then employs a different and specialized citation style. One guide in the suite is to be used in the creation of all nontechnical documents; it is additionally mandatory to use this nontechnical guide with all MSEM theses and final capstone projects. The other guide in the suite is to be used in the production of all technical documents; it is mandatory to use this guide with all MSE, MSST, and MSEV reports on applied and final projects.

Additional Resources

MSOE’s MSEM Research and Writing Guidelines at http://www.msoe.edu/business/msem/guidelines/
Purdue University’s Online Writing Lab at http://owl.english.purdue.edu/
Writing Guidelines for Engineering and Science Students (hosted by Virginia Tech) at http://www.writing.eng.vt.edu/
Engineering Communication Centre at the University of Toronto at http://www.ecf.utoronto.ca/~writing/handbook-lab.html
The Writing Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison at http://www.wisc.edu/writing/
Michigan Tech’s Writing Center at http://www.hu.mtu.edu/wc/
The Writing Center at Rensselaer at http://www.wecc.rpi.edu/
The University of Missouri’s Online Writery at http://www.missouri.edu/~lcwww/wlhome.html
Claremont Graduate University’s Writing Center at http://www.cgu.edu/pages/726.asp