teaching-phd-skills

Why this exists

Submissions stall on formatting, and they stall late — at the point where the science is done and the only thing between you and a submitted paper is a template you have never opened. The second failure is quieter: a journal template is a contract about length, and a draft written in Word at 1.15 spacing has no idea whether it fits. Finding out at submission that you are four pages over means cutting under deadline, which means cutting badly.

External material

Overleaf’s Learn LaTeX in 30 minutes — syntax, environments, compiling. It covers the language. It does not cover journal templates or managing a bibliography at the scale of a real paper, both of which are below.

Governing part

None.

The mechanic

1. The real journal’s official template, downloaded from the journal, named in your submission. Not a generic article class, not a template from a different journal that looks similar. IEEE, Elsevier, and INFORMS classes all differ in ways that matter.
2. Your own writing in it, not lorem ipsum — a draft, a proposal section, a chapter fragment. It does not have to be finished.
3. BibTeX exported from your reference manager. Not typed by hand. Hand-typed entries are where citation errors breed, and the citation-verification skill in M4 is where you will go looking for them.
4. Compile with zero errors. Then read the warnings, which is the step everyone skips. Overfull hbox warnings are how you find out a table is wider than the column.
5. Check the page count against the journal’s stated limit.

Deliverable

Overleaf link plus the compiled PDF.

Competency check

• The template is the journal’s official one, named
• Compiles with zero errors
• Warnings read, and any overfull box in a figure or table resolved
• Bibliography generated from a .bib file, not hand-written
• Page count stated against the journal’s limit

Turning it in

This replaces your writing entry for the week you do it. Submit it to that week’s WW assignment in Canvas — the same one you would have submitted anyway. It is not an extra piece of work on top of the log.

• In the text box: which journal’s template, and how far over or under the limit you landed.
• You hand in: An Overleaf share link plus the compiled PDF, in the target journal’s own template, zero errors

You do not submit anything to the milestone yet. When all five skills in M1 are done, submit the M1 — The Workbench assignment, which is just an index saying which week each one went in.

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