 So I've been meaning for a while to go into an MCEM report in detail and look at it almost like in the sentence level and say what I think about it and provide a bit of feedback and that raises the obvious question about whose report do I pick. There's probably one of a dozen or hundreds even students that I've seen in the last few years that I could dive into and go to town on. So I thought the fairest way to actually start that would be to do this one here it's a bit old was written in 2008 and it's mine so this is my MCEM report from over a decade ago. So we're going to go into this what do I think it does well what do I think it could improve on and generally what would I be thinking of and looking for if I was marking this today as a piece of work submitted to me. It's long ago enough that I've forgotten a lot of it so some of it was still news to me and I can pick up on what I wrote well and what we communicated well and what really needs an improvement. So if I was marking this what would I first look well let's zoom out and look at it look at the whole thing. Well this is 66 pages 65 66 pages that's quite a sizable document it's probably about right for an MCEM I think you don't want to be going much bigger than that you certainly don't want to be hitting 100 pages that's that's a lot. Mostly because what you can see at the end here there's four or five there's there's an earlier dozen pages of just data spectroscopic data summaries at the end and another eight pages of indices and technical detail at the end. And what you can also see is there's a lot of figures on here there's every every page pretty much I think there's a handful of pages at most that don't have some kind of image on or some kind of figure. So this is a very well illustrated report and it breaks up the text a lot. So I think that's something that when I've marked reports in the last few years there's a lot of students fall down on you. You all like to throw massive walls of text at these things don't do that just break it up with figures you know some kind of cliche like a picture is worth a thousand words think about that kind of thing. So this might be on the verge of being over illustrated I do go through a lot of structures and spend some time describing them what you need to do and what what is appropriate for your project is entirely up to you. But I would say you know use some figures you use them this goes up to 28 and I've seen people try to get away with 3 in an M camera I think 3 is a bit low you want to at least get into the dozen or so figures. So let's go back in and before we read the abstract the other thing to note before we start is this is assembled manually. What I mean is that this table of contents is free typed all of these dots here or dots that I've added in myself some of them have been turned into ellipsis characters and they don't match up and it's quite a raggedy right hand edge. And this was retyped and changed in the last few minutes before it was printed off and submitted. I can't recommend doing that at all just don't just learn how to use the software properly you want to be using these headings. You want to be using your caption references and cross references and then finally insert the table of contents at the end using the software. The same goes for the references as well. These references were free typed and you can see a couple of inconsistencies like this has a DOI number for some reason when the rest don't. Some use abbreviations some don't. The format is reasonably consistent. I tried to get this put the air at the end but I don't know whose format that is it's not the RSE format. But if you use citation management software you don't need to worry about that it will do it for you and if you're using citation management software it's really easy just to add the references and let the software deal with the numbering at the end. And what we'll see as we go through this is that the citations a little bit inconsistent some of it's used but not where it should be. And if this was done with citation management software it would be a lot more efficient to do that. So let's dive in. So the abstract ease rodium compounds are reacted with PH2 to observe multiple rodium dimers via NMR spectroscopy in concentrations usually below the threshold of NMR observation. That's fine I think as a starting point it gets it really gets to the point of what is happening. We've got some compounds we react them with hydrogen and we see multiple dimers found via NMR spectroscopy. And this is interesting because it's in concentrations usually below the threshold of observation. That's pretty much it. We're seeing things you don't normally see via NMR. The only thing I would probably change here is sticking some commas there because via NMR spectroscopy in concentrations. Well what's the little concentration here? It's suggested that electronic effects of phosphine and heli groups go in the rate and yield of CO loss. Rate and yield of CO loss let's talk about this a bit because I haven't established what this means. There's carbonyl on the compounds but when does it fall off? I know it's part of the mechanism it reacts with hydrogen and then CO falls off and then the dimer forms. But I'm not hinting at that mechanism in the abstract so this doesn't really make any sense. In fact there's a couple of points where this abstract could be expanded upon. It probably needs another paragraph's worth of material. We'll kind of zoom out we just see that there's these two paragraphs. A report this size could probably do with... If not a third paragraph on its own at least that much more text it needs to explain that there's mechanism here. We want to add something like that to it. There's a mechanism and CO loss needs to be added. Reaction of this with pyridine produces a fluxional dihydride. Yeah that's on all right notes on. What's probably not really clear as we go back in we then switch to a different part of the project. There was like two parts of this one with the hydrogen reactions and one with photochemical reactions. It's not immediately clear that this is a completely different thing now. It's a similar compound and it undergoes addition of benzene-viophytolosis to yield two isomers. Where the two products with the hydride ligand trance CO and hydride ligand trance CO were found on a ratio of three to one respectively. And it's getting straight to the point. Now I like writing like that. It gets to the point you don't mess around with who this is important because but it does lack a little bit of context. So this could probably do with at least something like, I don't know, complexes of the type MxClPr32. I'll put the subscripts in later. We are shown to act as cattle towards H2 and CH bonds, thermally and photochemically. That's a bit more of a better context statement because this is what this project's about. The first one is it's a catalyst towards H2 and the other one is a CH activation reaction. One's a thermal and one's a photochemical one. And there's a bit more context in the abstract. And then we can get straight to the point. So that's all right. If we get to this one at the end, now these phenylhydro complex thermally reductably illuminates. The activation parameters for this were determined as this. I like putting data into abstracts. It is the key data that if someone's reading your report for this information, or they want it front and center, they need to know what you found. And then it says, confirm me to a reductive elimination. I'm not entirely sure what that even means. I think I mean it conforms to a reductive elimination, but I don't know what I've written there. Actually, it doesn't make a lot of sense. I don't know what this means. I know that the point of this experiment is to find whether it is an associative or dissociative mechanism, because that number tells you. But it doesn't really give an indication there. So I mean it's an all right abstract. It gets to the point. It could do with these additions, I suppose. Right now, contents. Let's go down acknowledgments. It's a portal reference that dates it quite nicely. So introduction, nuclear magnetic resonance and overview. Yeah, these headings are usually quite good for structuring your document. It tells your reader what's going to happen, especially if you flip back to the table of contents. You can see how it goes through NMR, an overview of theory, parahydrogen, spin isomers, and then some chemistry. So some atoms when placed in a strong magnetic field can absorb radio waves of particular frequencies generating a spectrum of energies that can be used to identify the molecule under study and many of its other properties. Ah, come on. This is really common. You can proofread everything. And the first sentence has a typo in it. It's really important that you get that first sentence right, because if you do have a typo in it, that's going to give the... Well, it's not necessarily a bad impression, but the impression that you may not have looked at this very well and the marker's going to be now thinking, okay, what other errors do I need to go out and actively search for? Sometimes we don't find any in which case that first impression gets washed away quite quick, but you still need to think about that when someone's going to be marking it, because you want to guide this person around your document and give them the impression that you know what you're doing, because they are basically assessing your ability to do some science here. And if that first impression is that you're a little bit incompetent, you need to work really hard to wash that away afterwards. So the process which causes this phenomenon, termed magnetic resonance, was later exploited to create a form of analytical spectroscopy. So this is a bit of history. This would be fine at the beginning by literature review. But these first page and a half, two pages nearly, this is really basic NMR stuff. This probably shouldn't be relevant to a master's thesis. You should know this as a qualified chemist, what NMR is, where energy levels come from. The only thing that this really says is to introduce a little bit of technical jargon that it's important for explaining parahydrogen, because really the interesting part, the novel stuff, the stuff that is a master's level thing, not an undergraduate lecture thing, is the limitations of NMR right here. NMR is not without its shortcomings, despite its relatively easy use and almost universal applicability. So if I just said nuclear magnetic resonance instead of the acronym there, I could start the project here and I don't think I would be losing much, because a large amount of this even effect stuff doesn't come back into it. Sorry, let's go back up. But the limits of NMR do, because this is the new stuff. This is because we're talking about parahydrogen, and this is something that is used to enhance the signals of NMR. So this is a bit of more technical detail, a little bit of labelling, quantum mechanics, a little bit of talking about exchange of permutational symmetry, I forget which. So this is laying out a little bit of the chemical physics involved in parahydrogen. The one thing that it probably lacks is any specific references to it being used in a chemical sense. So if this was a longer literature review, that would definitely have to be there. If it's just an introduction, it doesn't necessarily need to be. You should probably look at whatever master's thesis or dissertations have been written in your research group before to see what's the expectation. I would probably expect if this was submitted to me more chemistry. Where has this been used? What kind of molecules have this been done by? What's the evidence that it's a useful technique to continue? And it doesn't really do that. This is just a basic explanation. And if you do my quantum course at any point, you'll get up to diagrams like this and labelling like this. So it's not the most advanced side of it. It's not really until this page, page 9 that we actually start seeing some chemistry. Vasca is complex. That's a rindium, carbonyl, a chloride, diaphosphine has been known and studied for many years. It's a 4-corner, 16-electron compound. It makes it an ideal base for a catalyst and has to... I know what I mean by that. It means it's like a framework. Complex is where you just replace the halide, you replace the phosphine. It's not really catalysing things, but base gets confused with base and acid. So it's probably not the best term to use. It's able to undergo oxidative addition with many species and bindage to reversibly. Now, this is interesting. This is chemistry. This is background chemistry. This is not necessarily stuff that would be covered at an undergraduate level, unless it's a specific example in your lecture course. But this is the project. It replaces a rindium with rhodium and that has slightly different reactivity, but I'm not really covering that. So generally this introduction is very, very vague. Here we go into phosphines and their inorganic significance. It's still... This is vague, basic stuff. This is not covering a lot of specific chemistry. It's not showing that breadth of wider reading that we'd expect a master student to have. I fixed that by the time I went and did a PhD in a very similar area. The intro to the thesis is a lot better. It's more comprehensive. There's a lot more material in it and a lot more specific examples. But the M-chem version lacks that. It's not really showing off a lot of wider reading. Can I shoot down to the references for a second? I know these are just broad overviews of magnetic resonance and then the basic para-hydrogen and then the basic vascous compound are ducate instead of ducate. Oh well. So it's not showing a lot of wider reading. I'd expect that from an M-chem student. You want to show for many years you want more than just one reference here. You want two or three. You want to be saying why is this? When it's four coordinate it's unsaturated. It can become six coordinate and if it's sixteen electron it can become eighteen electron. So oxidative addition can happen. And this is not really making that connection. So it does connect it to para-hydrogen a little bit but it doesn't really connect it to the rhodium stuff that's actually being done. So what this really needs to do is get more into the chemistry of it and do some more specifics. So we've got a table of phosphine cone angles and this is probably a very specific thing. Relevant values are summarized in table one. Table one is on the previous page. So two options. We can copy table one let's just do that now. That and put it here. So at least further than values, summarized in table one or we take that whole thing and we put it here instead. You don't want you always should. If you've got these figures or tables or something, refer to them in the text. Your text is there to explain the figure and to say why it's relevant and then you need to direct your reader to the thing you are talking about. So relevant values actually relevant values of these two parameters probably I'll probably add that kind of thing in. And here we have relevant phosphine cone angles and electronic fractures. I'll probably expand this a little bit as well because I don't know why these are relevant. Something I've for in this report some words to that effect make it good later. Just to say why are these relevant because the list of these the paper that this comes from has like a hundred in why is this why are these six relevant. This one's only relevant because it pops up in the conclusion in fact so still quite big photochemical stuff in addition to thermal reactions metal complexes can also be activated by light UV in light lies and region electronic things also basic stuff transition metal complexes are known to absorb like by yet this is not very specific because this is still this is a little bit of undergraduate chemistry from photochemistry it's not specific enough especially we then say in the following poor power hydrogen is used to examine but we don't have a break here we do not have a change of section so what this really needed here is something like some kind of change of section to say that we've stopped talking about this we're now talking about this that's usually I think a big thing I see in a lot of introduction to lab reports and it still holds on to masters and bachelor's theses this sudden skip to talking about in this report this is what I'm going to do usually comes unannounced and you end up skipping over from there let's talk about my literature review to the report and the jump isn't really indicated so in the following poor power hydrogens used to examine hydrogenation reactions in broad complexes the phosphine ligands altered once they've not previously been studied yeah those were new at the time and attempted to drive a trend based on electronic or steric factors so at least we're talking about the objectives here this is the aims and objectives are laid out it's a bit short but that's fine what probably I mean the thing that this does not do that now I've got a lot more years of experience with this chemistry is it doesn't really say why these two parts of the project are linked and it's because the HH bond and the CH bond are actually very similar in a few respects if you can catalyse the breakup of one you can probably catalyse the breakup of the other and if you can break this apart you can do some really interesting chemistry this is all about carbon relation you can insert CO and I don't really cover it it's really missing it's definitely in my PhD thesis it's not in here and that should be here because that is good chemical context that is the rationale for doing all of this so let's just go to the results and discussion the literature review is alright needs more literature but it at least introduces the basics so results and discussion so one thing I definitely see in lab reports and it does hold on into dissertations unfortunately is people will write results and just paste in their data like data tables and images and spectra and just throw everything at it and it makes no sense it's impossible to make heads or tails I'm reading this I'm not the expert in the project I don't know what happened if you're doing it for science your reader reading a paper doesn't know what happened either they're there to learn so you need to really guide your reader around what's happening so instead of just dumping your results into a big table and just leaving it that you should discuss what happens so what happens here and I think okay I'm biased because this is the way I was taught to write but I think it works really well is that we actually reintroduce what's going to happen so rodium analogue is a vascular complex and related compounds of that type are co-ordinary saturated 16 electron compounds kind of repeating what I said previously but okay that's fine these rodium compounds are previously thought not to undergo oxidative addition however using the power hydrogen we can show that it does that's what's going to happen and then we describe the experiment that actually happened when a solution of this one in benzene d6 is 1 to 343 two hydride residences are seen with significant intensity corresponding to structure 2 now I don't have a structure 1 and 2 really close by that's probably a downside to this that should be a lot closer so initially these signals are observed at higher temperatures but in degassing we can get it at 323295 this indicates that in order for H2 exchange to occur and the product to form and be easily observed higher temperatures are required so actually I think this sort of sentence is the kind of structure that you should really think about when you're writing these we are starting with what we did and then we go into what we saw and then we go into a little bit about how we then reacted to that when we saw that result and then a little bit of a comment on what it means so remember this is results and discussion so we're going to show results and talk a little bit about them as well so a little bit of commentary on your results as they appear is usually a good idea this could probably do with a little bit of expansion why do I think that high temperatures are required but why so I would think we need to add a little bit of why that would be the case do we think it's an activation energy thing is it something to do with the degassing change in the equilibrium by taking out some of the gases from the solution something like that so each of the hydrodress and the antifers are going to confirm that they come from parahydrogen that's at least as quick test that it works then I'm saying that 333 most 333 kelvin where most of these experiments are carried out I'm quoting all the substance chemical shifts there so at least I'm trying to establish that I'm going to be consistent with the temperature because these experiments are all done at different temperatures but we're going to report them for the one that was done only at 333 okay that's fine and these highly negative chemical shifts in comparison to the alkarygian indicate that hydrodegons transdacil and hydrogens are transdacil or expected to be further downfield here is another good thing you should cite this kind of statement this I know because I've already read this while yesterday this does start citing some papers to back up statements like this but not consistently and that's what I would kind of expect when you move into a masters level you need to contextualize all of the results that you say with respect to the previous literature you're going to be leaning on previous literature to say that these results mean that so you need to cite it at the right point stick your citations in as frequently as you can and I need a reference for why that is true so in the corresponding spectrum sharing figure 4 these resonance simplify greatly I like the spectrum it's one of my favourite ones it's just really quite clean and the way that it simplifies in the phosphorous in the no it's phosphorous decoupled isn't it when you decouple the phosphorous resonances you just see hydrogen interacting with rhodium and it's really nice and clear what's going on and this kind of describes it but I'm still not here we are figure 5 of the it is where the structures of these two molecules of the number 2 and 3 so if we come up to here corresponding to 2 I would probably expect at some point here see figure 5 something like that something like that I would add in that kind of thing just to direct people down you can even if you are doing cross references you can do figure 5 page 13 but put that in with cross references so that you don't need to update in so let's have a look at this figure in detail and this is again let's talk about the figure caption here so something like this I'll just put only this on the screen needs to stand on its own if you cut it out you need to make sense of it and what we can see here is you can make a bit of sense of it because the expansion of the high field region of the proton NMR spectrum are 1 in C6D6 upon addition of 3 atmospheres of hydrogen at 333 kelvin that's all the detail that you really need it is what it is it's where it came from it's why we're doing it really be the phosphorous decoupled spectrum at 333 I'd probably say of the same words to that effect because that still could be potentially ambiguous because of the same spectrum we just decoupled phosphorous from the NMR to simplify it and that's really nice we're doing figures as well you need to get away from a graph to show and you need to get away from my spectra of and get into a bit more detail what were the conditions what's the solvent kind of this needs to be readable on it so so let's zoom back out a little bit and we're talking about the additional resonances and we get the structures maybe that could have been done a bit further up closer to where we're talking to talking about this figure 5 page 14 always put those in with cross references so how you sequence your information that can actually be quite challenging you need to put this earlier because we put it too early let's cut that out and put it and show figure 5 well it would then become figure 4 again do it with the software not manually there wouldn't be an indication of why we think this structure is true but if we put it at the end building up a murder mystery which is not entirely how science should operate we should be able to give the game away a bit too early so how you sequence it is kind of up to you but don't make it like a complete mystery that you then reveal the identity of the killer at the end or whatever but also back up anything you see if you're going to put this a little bit earlier you can say these structures are actually let's put it there let's pretend this is still figure 5 let's add what would I add here I would say the structures were predicted by the spectrum described below from figures or technically figures 4 to about 6 or something like that because it's a few bits of spectra so we could give like a little mini abstract of why this is the case I think that's including a 13 CO living experiment described on page whichever one it is we could add in something that looks a bit like that kind of it's obviously been as confusing we know where we're going of course we then we have a bit of a knock on effect that you need to reformat but okay never mind you can deal with that later what you can probably see from these paragraphs is they're quite technically dense it's something that you can see just by staring at the paragraph you can see there's a lot of equals and numbers in there there's a lot of this is not just endless paragraphs there's data in there so to better characterize these now I would probably at this point then there needs to be another heading like somehow further experiments something again because I've set this up manually I'd have to figure out what that number is and that number would be two two one two one two again put it in with the headings one I figured this one out like a few months after I submitted that and it helps showing us that we've done some more characterization and then a proposed mechanism quite a comment on this as a style I don't know why I chose the Surrey font and quite chunky bold elements because it doesn't look great I probably wouldn't do this now because you see it is quite big and these arrows are getting bunched together and there's really no room for you to really make heads or tails of this mechanism it's all quite cramped so I wouldn't necessarily use that style in ChemDraw so if you are going to do a chemistry thesis and you are using a lot of ChemDraw use the style sheets within ChemDraw as well you can actually set it to settings set by particular journals pick one that's appropriate for your area and stick with it consistently I don't necessarily like the style of this anymore with the bold text and Surrey font but it is consistent all the structures are very similarly sized we go up to here where this one was similarly sized they are all consistent that's good the consistency on the figures here is good and that's because I've made them myself rather than trying desperately to screenshot papers or grab them from Wikipedia or wherever and that's really really important have as much control over your figures as possible for that consistency that makes it look really good and really readable and anyone who is trying to make heads or tails of it doesn't need to then translate it into a different style if all these styles are very different across your document actually becomes really difficult to read the consistency is key and then we talk about the Pyridine font I actually forgot I even did this until I re-read it and I've got a mechanism but I think this mechanism should probably be a bit higher higher up in the order here because actually hang on let's have a look I don't refer to yeah there it is scheme 2, but scheme 2 comes after I've referred to it so I'll probably make some reference to scheme 2 before that figure it probably comes in the right place but I'd probably stick a reference to it so undergoing exchange on the NMR timescale above 255 yeah I will probably see scheme 2 that kind of thing there that would be good that comes before this and then it possibly means that this becomes a little bit redundant have I said the same thing effectively twice maybe so it's alright the thing that's actually there we go we've got an actual citation there it's hiding so this is trying to say that we are saying that it's very similar to those reported previously for a similar reaction it's a question do you put that reported previously there or can you put reported previously and put the citation there I will probably say do it as early as possible to indicate that you are citing other people's work if you start talking about a load of stuff and then you put the little superscript number at the end of the paragraph see if we put it here it's not immediately clear that you are citing someone else's work so if you put it close to where you say reported previously please see that paper and just go exchange at higher temperatures maybe I'll stick a lot a few other citations here to say that this is quite traditional to see in NMR at least it's conventional to see it if there's this exchange going on the signals behave like that there are a few other citations you could add just to prove that again that's again a comment about integrating the literature into your report it's the contextualization I make it specific on the mark scheme that I'm currently running that you should contextualize your results this is what it's referring to make sure you put citations in there and that you're referring back to that literature it's not just for your introduction you do not do your literature review and then forget about it you go searching on web of language or web of science or whatever and you throw more at this you've got to back up these statements and this does it very inconsistently I think it does it more than a bad report does but it doesn't do it as often as a really good report does it's probably why I would drag this into the two core region into the first class region a sample of five was prepared in D6 benzene in 1, 2, 3, 3, 3 one thing that's I think when you're using numbering schemes for your compounds it can sometimes help to at least prep your reader with a list of structures and abbreviations first so that they are readily available if you've got a printed version it's often A3 and they fold out so you can always refer to it as you flip through and that's actually a good system but with an online submission in 2020 something you couldn't do that you will want to instead put it on the first page or in an appendix just so we know what the numbers are referring to so this was an interesting result because isopropylphosphorine is so electropositive this doesn't need hydrogen enhancement it just reacts with hydrogen but that also tells us something about the structure so this talks a little bit about why we think the structures are what they are does it alright I suppose and goes through some of the evidence these data indicate two symmetrical products with rodium fragments present as proposed structures or so on in figure 11 so these are proposed based on the fact that they are symmetrical I could probably put a little bit more logic in there they check the electron counting as well so now here we go this is probably 6 is produced by further CO loss why CO loss while the phosphorine isopropyl group that should be a 3 there shouldn't it that's a little bit ambiguous this group is highly electropositive donating strongly into the rodium d x squared minus y squared orbital and strengthening the rodium p-bomb therefore making CO loss a dominant mechanism that's actually quite good that's talking about a bit of chemical physics that's getting into a reason but it's I think it's one of the few times where this reward really gets into a good kind of chemical physics reason for why this is happening and it is a basically a chemical physics paper although it's on inorganic compounds and so there should be more stuff like this like there should be more of the basic chemistry being discussed there should be some more talk about that back bonding between the metal and CO and whether it's weaker or stronger and what what these ligands are actually doing in terms of molecular orbitals so a lot of words do get spent on recapping what went on but not necessarily many discussing this sort of thing there is if there were more statements like this I would probably bump this up to a first class paper rather than a two one it also have to have more of the citations attached to it like for instance has that been proven before is it a back bonding thing because it's a competing mechanism do we lose that ligand or that ligand has there been any work done on these phosphines before that show a difference right and there are a couple more figures so we're not going to spend too much time on it I like the spectra this one's a really interesting looking signal basically the only reason we identified a weird looking triply bridging thing this one is because there's previous observations and I talk about previous observations don't really talk about why but I absolutely need to cite this a lot I'm talking about Duncan Eisenberg which Duncan Eisenberg paper probably need to cite that I should probably bring the same thing down here don't be afraid of reusing the same reference in multiple places because you are still directing your reader to say I got this information from that paper which may mean you use the same number more than once three or four times five or six times doesn't matter suggest these let's do whatever and there's an observed previous previous Ali come on and I would probably put the citation here rather than the end of the sentence I probably shifted there maybe there's another couple of papers on these as well so don't forget to cite these citations should be used like punctuation there's a 16 there, where's that come from should that be because I'm saying it's been observed previously shouldn't I put reference 16 a bit higher as well I don't know one side effect of doing it manually as it thinks these are all headers even though it's blank and I've pushed this on to the next page manually rather than with a page brick you can see I'm much more competent at word now this is almost embarrassing to look through so complexes of the type rhodium halide carbonyl bisphosphine functionalised hybrid carbons via CH activation the UV radiation, two citations that statement probably could get four or five they're quite well studied these photochemical activations proceed via similar intermediates to the thermal H2 additions however different products eventually formed with no evidence of dimerisation so again this is introducing the results what is the point of this and I like when citations do this it's really important as a reader to know what's going on what we expect to see so tell us if you've got a new result section like this stick a little mini it's not quite an abstract but it's like a mini abstract at the beginning telling us what we're expecting to see and what's going to go on so in this section of rhodium analogue of vascular complex where we're doing dimethylphenylphosphine is investigated under photochemical conditions with benzene we don't really say why we're picking this one that could be a really useful statement to add because you should be reading this and at the end of every sentence a question should pop into your head and the next sentence should answer that question and I'd like when people write in that style I'll usually have a question in my head it's not like I'm intentionally thinking of one but one will pop into my head and then the next sentence answers it and poses another question then the next sentence answers that one it's a really nice way of writing and it's really kind of frustrating when that question pops into my head and I find it's not answered and then three or four pages later it is answering here so why that Ligand because of it's cone angle and electronic properties or intermediate compared to the previous ones there we go then we could move on again we're getting into this whole description of what happened a sample of nine in this what's prepared for what it allows overnight blah blah blah after radiation samples stored in dry acetone this sounds like a lot of experimental detail that you would probably do in your own experimental section but I think in the context of this where we were quite studying things by NMR in kind of real time with the reaction it's all right to recap what was happening because what we did and how it's done is quite important to the result the experimental, we'll look at the experimental in a moment it's used for something different and again referencing figures referencing figure 20 which was here we go there's hydrides we spotted um we're not referring to figure 19 figure 19 is not referred to um so we'll probably need to go here um with what producing structure figure 19 probably add in something like that because that figure really does need to referred to to say well what's the point of this well this links up with that very first sentence it's the photochemical reaction is happening here um and then some phosphorus NMR let's let's skip a little bit the characterization stuff to some kinetics because this is relatively interesting um so we're repeating a reductive elimination process and watching it via NMR at five different temperatures quite low temperatures as well it's quite interesting to do NMR at low temperature you have to basically blast liquid nitrogen up the middle of the spectrometer and it takes a while um but it's it's it's quite fun uh so the reaction scene is going to figure 54 and the method used to model rates is described in appendix too uh actually that's quite good because there's a I'm pointing to the appendix for the experimental data and the method and citing where the method came from at the same time um I think that's fine and then we get the rates and we're discussing that and here's some modeling and what kind of annoyed me I don't know how this has happened whether it's just degraded over time but that jpeg quality is not very good and this pops out of Excel so this there's no excuse for me to have a a figure degraded that much you can barely read the numbers you certainly can't you can just about if you squint and be very careful see that that says time in minutes um but it doesn't it's not a very clear figure so make sure your figures are high quality that will probably be a couple of brownie punts knocked off and this table also looks a little bit inconsistent as well like these numbers have been pasted on and I haven't put the borders back in um it's not obviously not a major problem but that's not like an inattention to detail thing does it suggest it was rushed and if it suggests it was rushed is the data actually reliable or was I doing this at 2am the night before right and we have to think about that kind of thing if you look like you've cared for your data you probably cared for your data um and it's probably more accurate and correct um couple of things about this table no units on the rate constants those should be either per minute or per second I can't remember what the what that's actually piped out practice probably why there aren't units on there because I didn't know whether they were per second or per minute but always but if you're going to do something like this like a kinetic thing through your lecture notes it'll be year one physical chemistry kinetics everyone does it everyone in the world who does a chemistry degree does chemical kinetics quite early on go back and reread it and get the basics right things like the units of rate constants because that's not actually on there the texture is units of rate constant isn't because they're not dimensionless um errors odd reporters described in appendix 2 the trouble is those errors are actually actually nonsense they're some of residuals and they're not meaningful errors actually it took me a little while to figure out how to do errors in that nonlinear regression so I'm not surprised but again that's something that I would be looking for if I wanted an excuse to bump this up to that first class top grade is that error meaningful has it been done correctly and I don't think it has been in here there's a little bit of more care and attention I needed there certainly much bigger on errors than I used to be um work on some of the system field suggested that I summarization again I'd probably stick the citation after the name rather than waiting to the end of the sentence stylistic choice I prefer now so to test the cycles the second series was modelled where I summarization was likely to occur and we got this results instead um this is generally alright I think it's it's straight forward describing what's happening there's a little bit of inconsistency between the format of this table and that table the borders are different sizes I'm also suddenly switching to a sans serif font so I don't know what the issue is there um it it feels a little bit slapdash alright and then determination of the activation parameters determination of uh do see this a lot when people try to try to make a passive voice thing um and it just reads quite awkwardly I would probably say determining activation parameters or just activation parameters you know just do it activation parameters but be bit of um addition of I don't know 7 of those Lee oh 12 in 12 B yeah there you go it's a bit more descriptive now um and then for some reason I derive the ironing equation and I don't quite know why I need to do that I could probably just skip straight to here and and lose this um again at master's level it is it's sort of a choice and a balance that you need to make do you want to put this stuff in or not the pros of putting stuff in like this derivation is that it proves that you understand what you're doing and it proves that you know your stuff but it takes up words that you could be using better you don't want to you could easily fill hundreds of pages of this basic stuff and then we'd get the impression of great you went your lecture notes but what's your contribution to the project then right you might you might want to put a little bit of this in but then focus on citing the literature and focus on what your experimental design was rather than going over this um quite basic derivation stuff uh and then we get to the actual numbers I would think as I don't really say where these these numbers these errors I know these are important errors especially because one's huge I don't really say where it comes from uh was this back when I knew line stats or did I do it for me I can't remember um and it doesn't say it doesn't really say what these are whether they're standard errors or standard deviations or something and then we plot the graph and you can see it's not the best straight line I would certainly uh recommend that you do better than that or at least be more critical of your data of your alleged straight line looks like that it's it's not the best and then we repeat the same in the presence of CO and this is kind of the point of this experiment because you fertilize with that catalyst and benzene in the presence of carbon monoxide um you get benzaldehyde out you do a carbon-carbon bond forming reaction you functionalize benzene photochemically using just CO it's very atom efficient reaction and a very energy efficient reaction um let's show another mechanism um and then it just kind of ends and peters out which is uh that's fine your results and discussion just just end where the natural stopping point is I suppose if you want to try and get um get a final concluding statement out that ends your results and discussion on a bang sure try that but it's not really essential and we jump to the conclusion and I actually think this conclusion is terrible um because what I think a good conclusion should do is it should recap what you've done it should like literally it feels like it's reaching back into the previous part of the report and say on page X I did that on page Y we did that and we combine those two results together uh we can we can show that this happens so let's see what this says instead power hydrogen has played an important role in elucidating the reactivity of these rodium compounds that's not very specific and what are these rodium compounds there's a range of them altering the phosphine ligand has shown massive changes in what products inform us that's alright but it's not very specific um altering the phosphine ligand well it's not very specific about what that means what are we altering well it's the tolman cone angle and the electronic parameter that are altering that was raised in the introduction it should make an appearance here we can uh we could add in that kind of thing altering the phosphine ligand tolman parameter so okay that's a little bit better do we have a bit more conclusion about that but yeah there's a bit more when when we increase the electronic parameter enough you know that reacts like that instead of needing power hydrogen anyway doesn't really say it here so there's potential for the trend between the adopter structure and the steric and electronic effects to appear out of this work of enough ligands can be studied um and then I think I said at the very end further work to confirm this would be required um these are weird statements to make um actually things like more work needed and more study needed are banned from certain journals I think the British medical journal bans that phrase exactly yeah because you're not being very specific to say you're gonna do more work on it and be very specific about what kind of work um now to its credit this report does that the next phosphine study would be try benzoylphosphine due to its electronic factor being between these but with a much larger cone angle you know that's alright that's that's quite specific um and all the potential elements to butyl group because it's more electropositive you know this is good but we haven't actually done any conclusion the conclusion's been done this two sentences and then I get onto future work uh and the future work section I suppose is alright it's getting it's doing some things that are quite specific I'll highlight that in green because I like it that's that's specific that is a specific thing that we could do next and why we are doing it next it doesn't really do that reaching back and recapping and everything uh and the photochemical one evidence presented that is summarization does not occur that's pretty solid concluding statement but I will probably reach back and say what the evidence was like evidence has been presented what evidence which evidence come with which evidence do I want um so I probably say the kinetic evidence and recap those numbers as well maybe um because yeah it's it's something to do with the errors and it's actually it's kind of inconclusive evidence more than anything um oh and then we did this thing this this this thing we don't I don't currently set in the projects that I run but it was I might after having re-read this it's a context statement tells you about what um you learned or what you need to apply so a key element to this project has been understanding NMR uh basing on organic chemistry has been essential to understanding um lol because I don't actually do much in the way of electron counting on all the structures I think I do but I don't mention it I definitely care you have to check that each uh metal centers are the 16 or 18 electron and you have to check the states and I don't think I really did that um or at least I'm not indicating that I've done that so saturated and saturated yada yada yada that's kind of thing basic and advanced authority skills needed in the fairly simple synthetic procedures that were employed okay some advanced in fairly simple synthetic procedures okay I mean this this is absolutely true you really need cling glassware to synthesize these things you even breathe in their vicinity and you'll just see nothing but phosphinoxide in your NMR spectrum so that's it um let's have a look at the experimental so there's a lot of experimental detail in terms of what was done but the experimental here is like a general statement about how it was uh what went on now depending on the type of project you are doing this can be very very different if you're doing a purely synthetic project almost all of it is experimental procedures there's a lot of lists of things you made uh if you're doing something more analytical uh it will be a little bit more like I've laid it out and you'll have a general experimental at the end of how you set up your equipment and then descriptions of the individual bits and pieces that you did so since these are manipulations carried out in the new conditions the NMRs were done on those instruments we use analytical words um solvents at all times yes all of this detail is here um and this is quite important to include if you want anyone to criticize your work or or replicator you need to be very specific about what you got um because anything with it hasn't been purified these compounds can be very sensitive um to impurities um para hydrogen work especially it's it's quite interesting because you can find a ridium impurities in rhodium compounds so you can actually have a tiny bit of a ridium in there and so you get these unexplained para hydrogen signals where the hydrogen is reacting with the iridium impurity and that must be like the nano molar region um anyway that's interesting stuff uh stored at minus 30 um then a synthesis of this this is the only one I synthesized and I think the it doesn't necessarily come across in the report what I inherited from a former PhD student and what I made myself so I made the bimethylphenylphosphine I inherited the triethylphosphine and used a lot of it um from someone else and you know this is a straightforward synthesis prep it's in the shorthand really quick and punchy way that we write these preps um the only thing I would say about this is it probably needs a mechanism or some kind of structural indication what these dimers are like and what this final monomer is like like going from rhodium trichloride to this to this to this uh that could probably be illustrated you could probably also stick this on one line I think this would save a bit of space if you did it this way if you don't you know uh organic preps before this kind of that kind of thing will be familiar to you bold thing you're making and then you give the description after it something like that maybe photochemistry and there's a couple diagrams then the appendices all the spectroscopic data so spectroscopic data so this is useful um someone who's marking it I wouldn't necessarily check everything but it is nice to see it because I'm going to be referencing um what are your compounds do you this this is more an indication that you know what you are doing than anything else because it means you're organized you know what compounds belong to which number and you know what spectra belong to each number so here's the spectroscopic summary of this compound and the spectroscopic summary of that one and this just keeps going some of them are blank which one's that you know we don't don't get the phosphorus of that one it's got the phosphorus of the other one right um so this keeps going on for a while so these are all of the compounds known I think I treble the size of this list of my phd sneezes um so table 12 table 13 now one um this is determining the rate of constants this one's worth pointing out because this is actually more or less copy pasted I don't think I wrote much of this myself because it's a standard method um and I'd actually like to do a video on how to do this in excel at one point because it's really interesting but at the time I don't think I fully understood what was going on so I just copied this in rewrote a few bits of it and so that would be flagged up as plagiarism if you submitted it so you turn it in these days so I can't recommend you do that but if it's an appendix no one's going to care too much it doesn't really matter too much as long as you cite where it is and it's adapted from a particular place um so that's there, maybe it didn't need to be but it's useful to put it in there because it is a big part of the kinetics part there and it is probably best put in an appendix because it is not really experimental data it's certainly too long to fit in the body text and no one needs to read it but it needs to be there as a kind of a reference and then there's generating power hydrogen again I think I covered this in my quantum course at the end then we get to the references and that's it you can see because they've been manually typed there's some random changes in font size a few inconsistencies 27 references um probably alright so this kind of thing is it's not terrible it's actually better than I thought it would be I dug this out, I expected this to be really embarrassing but it's not too bad it does a good straightforward way of describing what happened it really needs to use the literature better if it wants to jump itself up into a first-class mark so I'm not surprised it only scored in the 60s um and there's a little bit of logic missing in the structure of assignments but apart from that it's fine this is how they should look in the written I think um certainly doesn't need too much more doing to it to really make it quite a good report um it's alright where it is and again a lot of illustrations in it, a lot of really solid figure captions, that's the kind of thing that I'm looking for yeah I'm biased, I was trained to write this way so yeah I'm gonna look for it now but I do think there are good reasons I think that method's really good like you do what I did what I saw what it means, what am I gonna do next that kind of loop through that loop through that with your description um and I think that's all I have to say about this alright that's a kind of solid 2-1 work really great