A-level Computing 2009/AQA/The Computing Practical Project/Quality of Writing





Having written this text book, I've come to discover that Quality of Writing is something that people find very important. If it isn't well written and presented then you are going to find it very hard to read and you probably wouldn't recommend it to your friends. It's exactly the same with your coursework, but if you don't present your work very well then you are going to lose marks and get your teacher very cross. Overall this section is only worth 3 marks, but these are also the 3 easiest marks in the entire Unit. If you follow the guidelines below then you are almost guaranteed to get them.  Eye have a spelling chequer,

It came with my Pea Sea.

It plane lee marks four my revue

Miss Steaks I can knot sea.

Eye strike the quays and type a whirred

And weight four it two say

Weather eye am write oar wrong

It tells me straight a weigh.

Eye ran this poem threw it,

Your shore real glad two no.

Its vary polished in its weigh.

My chequer tolled me sew.

A chequer is a bless thing,

It freeze yew lodes of thyme.

It helps me right all stiles of righting,

And aides me when eye rime.

Each frays come posed up on my screen

Eye trussed too bee a joule.

The chequer pours o'er every word

Two cheque sum spelling rule. The original version of this poem was written by Jerrold H. Zar in 1992. An unsophisticated spell checker will find little or no fault with this poem because it checks words in isolation. A more sophisticated spell checker will make use of a language model to consider the context in which a word occurs.

Use a Word Processor
This seems pretty obvious. A lot of schools/colleges have agreements that promote the use Microsoft Office and Word, check to see if you can get a cheap copy of that. Alternatively you can any implementation of OpenOffice, like download LibreOffice or other free Word alternatives, like AbiWord.

If you want to be really clever and write something in LaTeX then feel free, but it's probably not worth the effort right now.

Use a footer
You get given marks for having footers on your work. This needs to include the following:

Your Name | The title of the Project | The page number P Kemp | My Amazing Fruit Stall Database | 12/97


 * Footers in Word
 * Footers in OpenOffice

Check your Spelling and Grammar
This is pretty obvious and should be easy enough to do as spelling mistakes are normally highlighted with little red squiggly lines. However, as you can see to the right there are some errors that your spell checker can't pick up. You have to proof read it!

Proof read
Before every draft you hand in, and especially before your final deadline, proof read your work. This means sitting down and reading through everything you have written. You will be amazed at how many little mistakes you made without realising it. Even better, get a friend or member of your family to read it. If they can understand it then you are sure that the examiner will be able to understand it and you will get all the marks that you deserve.

DO NOT rely on your teacher to proof read your work, they have a lot to mark and might get annoyed with you. It is far better to ask them to give you ideas on how to improve your technical work than asking them to explain the difference between 'they're', 'there' and 'their'!

Use Headings NOT Bold and Underline
When students are in years 7 and 8 they have great fun with word art and making their titles look very fancy. You don't get any marks for having fancy titles, in fact using them could make you lose marks.

If you have never used Heading styles before, now is the time to learn. By using styles such as Heading 1 and Heading 2 it will allow you to automatically create a table of contents! Imagine that, no need to count the page numbers.


 * Using Headings in Word
 * Using Headings in OpenOffice

Use a contents page
It is essential that the marker can navigate their way through your report. To help them with this we are going to add a table of contents at the front of the document. Doing this manually can take a long time, but if you use headings then your can automate the entire process. Remember if you change any text you will need to update your contents page to show the new layout. The last thing you should do before printing is to update the contents page!

Look at the videos above to see how it is done.

Widows and Orphans
A very common mistake when writing reports is to mess up the layout. This can involve having headings at the bottom of the page and the text accompanying that text on the next page (Widow) or having the text slipping onto the next page (Orphan). This makes it very hard to read.

Widow end of paragraph at the top of a page:

Orphan line of paragraph at the bottom of a page:

To make sure that your text is nice and tidy you need to make sure that if you have a Widowed header, you make sure that it starts off on the next page. You can do this by using lots of carriage returns, but an easier and tidier way is to use page breaks. You may not have used these before, they are a great way of making sure that everything is well laid out.

First of all find the ¶ button. This shows us the formatting of the page.

Next find a heading that you want to switch to the next page, put the cursor in the front of the title and press "CTRL+Enter"

A page break should appear and things should be a little neater.


 * Wikipedia article


 * using page breaks in Word
 * using page breaks in OpenOffice

Make sure your screenshots are clear
So your project works and you have a lot of screen shots to show that your testing works. However the screenshots are so small that you can't read the data entered or the error messages. This means you are going to lose marks as your evidence of testing doesn't show any testing! Make sure that you crop unneeded parts of the screen out of your images. Use the crop button.


 * using crop in Word
 * using crop in OpenOffice