 So, effective and efficient communication, I have used the words effective and efficient earlier, but let me tell you what they mean again in this context, so the word effective means that I achieve the goal of my communication, so I have some idea which I want to communicate and you get the same idea that I want to communicate that is there in my mind through my communication. If I am able to reach you, reach my idea to you correctly, then I say I am being effective. Efficient, so efficiency has to do with the effort that I take to communicate my idea, so I may use a many words to communicate my idea and on the other hand I could use a fewer number of words to communicate my idea, so if I am able to do with least effort, least number of words, then I say my communication is efficient, so we need to look at both these dimensions of communication, effectiveness and efficiency, so from this point of view we must look at the communication. So, outline of the contents of this part of the talk are modes and dimensions of communication, oral communication, written communication and some prescriptions for developing communication skills. So, styles of communication, broadly we talk about three styles formal, informal and casual, so for instance a teacher teaching in the class, teacher is being formal or a researcher making a presentation in a conference, it is a formal presentation. Now teacher speaking to the students in the class about some of the interest that the students may have their hobbies and so on, may be the students and the teacher attended some cultural function the previous day and the teacher is talking to the student about the function and so on, so here the setting will be informal, normally in formal settings the distance between the person who is communicating and the audience or the person people who are listening this distance will be longer whereas in an informal communication normally the distance is small, so you are trying to make closer contact with the person in an informal communication. Now often at least the students have difficulty distinguishing between informal and casual communication. So many times students want to be informal while communicating with their teachers but end up being casual, so what is the difference between informal and casual, now this is something this question I will leave it to you at the end of this session I will ask some responses what do you think are the differences between informal and casual communication please illustrate with some example, so you take an example and tell us that why do you think a particular communication is casual and not informal, let me move on to the next mode of communication modes of communication namely vertical and horizontal, so normally vertical communication is between boss and subordinate, so where there is a hierarchical difference between the people between which communication is happening then we say it is vertical. On the other hand communication between people of the same status we call it as horizontal then dimensions of communication, so there are four dimensions two I have mentioned already effectiveness and efficiency which are primarily important dimensions which I am going to focus on but there are other dimensions such as understanding and agreement, so let me give examples to illustrate some of the ideas, here is an example of ineffective communication, so this is an email sent by a student who completed MS program, MS is a master's degree by research, now this is the email the student sent to the guide, sir my employer wants a letter about the completion of my thesis written by you, now what does this mean was the thesis written by the guide because that is what this seems to indicate a letter from the guide about the completion of my thesis written by you, so this is an example of ineffective communication, so you see grammatically you cannot find fault but it is not communicating correctly the fact that the person wants a letter from the guide about some thesis which the student has submitted earlier, so again I will leave it as an assignment to rearrange the words so that it communicates this information correctly, so probably you could say that sir my employer wants a letter about my thesis about the completion of my thesis, now the letter is to be written by the guide not the thesis, so my employer wants a letter from you or a letter written by you about the completion of my thesis, so you have to rearrange these words, now very often most of our communication is ineffective because we do not arrange the words properly, now what is required for an effective communication, now here is an example I will not read this out because it is a relatively long paragraph normally slide should not contain this much text but this is an exception because I have to put the complete information on this slide, so I will give you a couple of minutes to read this letter which was written by a person named Okil Chandrasen here at the bottom of the slide the name is given to Saibganj divisional railway office and it is according to the information that I have this letter was responsible for introduction of toilets in trains, it was written in 1909, so please read this language of this letter and then I will make some comments, now if you read the language of this it is very humorous, if you read the language definitely it does not confirm to what we normally understand by English language, so what you find is this person is a Bengali who thinks in his own language but he has tried his best to transliterate whatever he has felt in English, now the point I want to make here is even though the language looks so bad in the sense the construction of the sentences the words that are used the transliteration of some Indian language but still it is an effective communication as you can see the effect it has had in fact this was responsible for introduction of toilets in trains because the person has vividly described his difficulty though the language is not really sophisticated but still the communication is effective, the point I want to make is it is not the sophistication of the language that is required for being effective in communication, it is a manner in which you express an idea, now let us look at the dimension of efficiency what is it that makes communication efficient or inefficient, so here in the left hand side column I have indicated number of words which are commonly used by many while writing papers and so on and to the right in the column to the right I have given a simple equivalent of these number of words which are on the left, so for example a considerable amount of this phrase can be replaced by the word much, so much means the same as a considerable amount of instead of saying the given data you can say data instead of saying in the event that you can simply say if deposited precipitate well all precipitates are deposited, so you do not have to say deposited precipitate it is redundancy you just say precipitate instead of saying the nature of Hoyle's work is always of a provocative kind you can say Hoyle's work is always provocative this is a much shorter sentence communicating the same idea, so now this is how our communication can be made efficient, in fact our research has shown that when a student who is not well versed in communication writes his or her first journal paper a experienced writer can reduce this paper to almost 40 percent of its original size by proper choice of words, in fact when I was doing this course in NIT Jalandhar some years ago there was one experienced teacher sitting there and after my presentation on communication skills he went back to his first paper that he had written and next day he came and said, so actually I applied many of these ideas and I found that after so many years I never bothered to check this that my first paper I could have reduced to 50 percent of its size, so by proper choice of words we can improve the efficiency of our communication both oral and written. Pascal you know was a great scientist he was writing a letter and this is what was his first line in one of the letters he said I am writing a long letter since I do not have the time to write a shorter one, so the point is in order to make your communication efficient you have to put in effort it takes a time if you want to make a 20 minute presentation effectively and efficiently then you have to spend a lot of time in making it preparing a 20 minute presentation on the other hand the amount of effort that you will need to take to make a one hour presentation will be less than the amount of time you will take to make a 20 minute presentation, so whenever you want to communicate an idea in least amount of effort you will have to spend a considerable amount of effort in making the communication efficient, so that is why writing shorter papers in letters journals like today you have what are called letter papers right papers which are called letters these are mainly 3 or 4 page papers and they take much longer to write than a full length paper which may be 8 pages because you have to express the idea in a compact form, now communication it is important to know that communication is for others, so whenever you write you please know that it is for others, so others should understand what you want to say and improvement in communication improves the quality of learning process and interpersonal relations, so this is really important, now let me discuss a few points about oral communication, we had some presentations in the morning and then we got some feedback like people said that you know particular communication was effect clear and like that, so it is important for us to know that what are the factors which going to making a an oral communication effective, now this is some very interesting piece of research which we may find a little bit surprising in the beginning, but if we take the results of this research then we will be able to improve our communication oral communication, now this research shows that 55 percent of the impact that is made in oral communication is because of non-verbal factors, namely gesture and facial expression, so eye contact and looking at the audience and your facial expression, so if you look very serious then that can reduce the impact, so if your face facial expression is relaxed and pleasing it can make tremendous impact on the audience, similarly gestures, now for instance if I am sitting the way I am right now and I am not able to do any gestures with hands and so on, then I am reducing the impact of my communication, now this is one of the reasons why I mean if you stand up and then communicate you tend to be a better communicator, so since I am sitting down because this is a long day and several hours of speaking in the standing position can be tiring, but otherwise it is a good idea to stand up and communicate, then after gesture and facial expression the next important component that decides your impact in oral communication are factors that go by the term vocal, so these include spoken words sorry pauses stress and intonation, not the spoken words the words themselves are only 7 percent, so verbal is 38 plus 7 of which only 7 percent is for the words that you choose in communication that is amazingly a small percentage, so if you spend lot of time in perfecting your language that does not necessarily improve oral communication, yes it might improve the effectiveness of written communication, but oral communication what is more important is whether and where do you pause, where do you stress and whether you modulate your voice, so stress pause and intonation is these are very very important and they have 38 percent contribution in the effectiveness of the presentation, now in fact again giving the example of NIT Jalandhar where I made this where I taught this course, one teacher who was teaching for 5 years in that institute came to me and said that sir all this theory that you talk about is good, but it does not work in practice, for instance he said that he has been spending a lot of time in rehearsing his ideas and so on, but he always gets a poor feedback from the students, so over 5 years even though he has spent lot of effort in improving his teaching, he feels he has spent lot of effort, but student feedback has not changed, so in according to him it is not clear what is it that makes impact and all these ideas are theoretical and may not have any practical significance, now he spoke only a few sentences to me and then I could recognize from the way he spoke where is the problem though he could not recognize, so all of us it is not very easy to recognize our faults, so we must take the help of others particularly in matters of communication to improve our own communication, so in this case for instance the problem was the particular teacher had a very heavy accent of his own mother tongue on the English language that he is he was speaking, for instance this person happened to a Bengali and his accent had a very strong Bengali, his speech has a very strong Bengali accent, so it was very difficult for people in Jalandhar in Punjab to understand what he was talking about, so if I were to now place this problem in this context of the slide that I have shown, the problem lies with the stress given to the various parts of a word, so accent has to do with stress and how you utter a word, now all of us are not native English speakers, so our speech will have the impact of our own mother tongue which we often use for communicating at home and with friends, but the point is the accent should not be such that other people are not able to follow you, so accent is very very important, so one must learn to use the proper accent, similarly there was a comment that a particular speaker spoke very fast, so what does it mean, it means that the person did not give pause between sentences or between words and that is why it can make a difficult to understand ideas particularly if the ideas are profound then this matters a lot, so in fact there is a guideline for good teaching and the guideline says that think fast but speak slowly, so we should not think fast, we must give pauses and pauses at the right place, now the next important issue is attention span, attention span of the audience research shows that it is as follows, initial 20 minutes of concentration, lapse for 10 to 20 minutes and then slight recovery and then renewed relapse till the end, so what this means is you can hold the attention of the audience for only 20 minutes, if that is so all our classes are 50 minutes to 1 hour duration and it is really a challenge to hold the attention of people for this long, for instance we are having 1 and half hour sessions and 1 hour it is not very easy to listen to someone for that long a time, in fact that is why it is suggested that we should have frequent interactions in the class to break the monotony and similarly the speaker has to use certain techniques like you know listed here, the attention span can be increased by adding variety to the talk, so interaction diagrams audio visuals wearing the pace of speech pitch of the voice length of sentence, so you can use the short sentence followed by long sentence and so on, so all sentences should not be of the same length pauses repetition gesturing with hands and some humor, so these are all the various methods by which you can increase the attention span, so please pay a particular attention to each of the words that are listed here and if you want to improve your teaching, your communication then please tick whether you are using all these means for increasing the attention span in your class such as interaction, are you having frequent interactions, are you using diagrams, someone said that the slides did not have any diagrams, a presentation lag diagrams, so are you using audio visuals, are you wearing the pitch of your voice and so on, are you using gestures or do you stand and hold your hands close to your body and then remain like that and occasionally are you cracking jokes and things like that, so let us continue from where we left, we talked about the attention span and how to improve the attention span and before this we spoke about effectiveness in communication, how it is related to the arrangement of words and how it is not so much dependent on the choice of or rather on the grammar of the language, but it more on how you, vividly you communicate your idea and then we also gave some examples of how communication becomes inefficient when instead of using a single word you use a number of words for communicating the same idea. After the attention span, now let us explain the role of various features of oral communication, so we said that 55 percent of oral communication, the impact in oral communication depends on facial expression and gestures, hand gestures and body language and so on, so 55 percent is non-verbal, out of the verbal part about 38 percent is vocal, so where we said pause, stress and intonation are important, so here is some description of these three features, so the pause it gives prominence to a word by isolation, it raises suspense, so if you use a pause you can raise the suspense of the audience, sometimes of course if the pause is too long it may be caused by nervousness and memory lapse, so that is a negative feature, so you must not pause for a long time, but you must pause may be between words occasionally to emphasize some word or between sentences definitely stress. Now between sentences, each word is not of equal earth shattering importance, nouns and verbs receive more stress than adjectives and adverbs and then we give example of how accent is very very important in effective communication, intonation, variation of pitch conveying subtleties of meaning should be connected with the thoughts and attitudes of speaker, so your variation should be appropriate to the idea which you are communicating, for instance in one of our presentations that we had in the morning it was pointed out that in some cases the slide, the material on the slide and what was talked about there was a disconnect between the two and that cause some irritation, similarly if the intonation of your speech is not in accordance with the emotion that you are trying to communicate or the idea you are trying to communicate then this can be irritating to the audience. Some more aspects of nonverbal behavior, a very important feature is that if verbal messages and nonverbal behavior or contradictory audience gives more weight to the nonverbal message is very very important, so let me give a practical example of this from my own experience, the first time I went outside India it happened to be Germany and after I landed from my aircraft my German host took me to a hotel, a restaurant for some refreshment and then in fact I had not met my host earlier, we had only exchanged emails before that, so that was the first location when we were face to face. After about 5 minutes of exchanges, informal exchanges my German host asked me a question, he said Shri Pat please do not feel hurt but I am asking a personal question, so I was wondering what personal question could it be, he said that you know when you nod your head I cannot figure out whether you are agreeing with me or disagreeing with me, now I was surprised, so what I never face such a difficulty with anyone here in India, so I asked him, so please tell me how do I express my agreement, if let us say I was a German how would I express my agreement or disagreement, so he said if you wanted to say yes you will nod your head vertically, so if you do it like this then it means yes, on the other hand if you want to say no then you nod horizontally, so perfect horizontal movement it means no and perfect vertical movement means yes, so he said I am not able to connect to you because when you nod your head you know you sometimes do this, so I do not know whether it means yes or no, now this was a very revealing experience to me and it conveys very effectively how body language or non-verbal behavior is more important than the words you choose, so in terms of my words I was using the right words to express my agreement or you know yes saying yes or no, but somehow my non-verbal behavior in this particular case the nodding of my head, if I was in India there would not be any problem, so it is not that we must nod the head like the Germans do that is not what I am saying, what I am saying is that the body language plays an important role and in fact it dominates over the words you speak when you interact when you do interpersonal communication, so then some other issues like proximity and orientation are indicated in the slide, relative position of speakers it matters a lot, in the presentations done just after lunch one feedback was that in some cases the person was not facing the audience and it did not seem to make eye contact, so it is important that you position yourself properly with respect to the audience, so for instance now since I have to face the camera because I have to address the audience, remote audience I am not looking at the people who are sitting here on both sides and so I am not making any eye contact with them, so I am sure they are missing out on the eye contact, so this is very important we must look at the speakers when we are making eye contact and you must position yourself properly, so some positions are indicated here normally in formal communication facing each other is the best possible position this is what you must follow, so for instance it is not good in a formal communication like speaking at a conference and so on or teaching where your audience is to your side, so let us say you are the speaker here and the audience is sitting here this is not a good arrangement, but for informal communication this can be good in fact for informal communication two people sitting side by side or horizontal communication between people of the same status this is the best if you want to engage in communication in which you would like to maintain the same status between the two people who are communicating then this is the best position and this is the worst for that kind of a situation ok facing each other is not good normally in this cases one person is the boss and the other person is the subordinate that is the meaning, now here are some more points on nonverbal behavior which are important you can go through this aspects in the slide because they are available with you I will not I will just skip necessary aspects of talk it should be audible, visible, lucid and interesting now how do you make your talk lucid and interesting and you know it is for instance you must be audible now in conferences many times when students are asking questions students or researchers they are asking questions they do not take care of this aspect and this can be very distracting for instance people sitting in the audience in their own place they do not get up so they do not become visible and then they are speaking into a mic and they do not take care to hold the mic close to them so they are not audible so this is an example where people do not take care to make themselves visible and audible to make a talk lucid and interesting it is very important to introduce the subject properly so introduction is a very important part of your talk you must spend sufficient time in introducing the idea in an interesting manner lucidity depends on structure and organization interest depends on contents whether you are using facts concepts principles procedures and all these different aspects in your talk some of the other points I have explained already earlier now here are some more guidelines for conference presentation you can go through them they are self-explanatory what is important here is planning is a must supposing you are going to make a 20 minute presentation at a conference you must give that talk to yourself at least two or three times and maybe at least once to a mock audience before you make the actual presentation your title should be short and catchy so this is also important here are some more things to be taken care of about slides there should not be too many slides so I found in the morning that were not in the morning the afternoon session that you all the three presentations which were made they had the appropriate number of slides so on this count all the presentations were following the correct guideline about one slide a minute roughly now color now this is where there was a feedback about one of the presentations that the choice of color was not proper so for instance using red color text in a black background is a poor combination the contrast is very poor okay so if you choose a dark background you must use a light lettering for instance in this case I have a dark background blue the lettering is in white so contrast is clear or a light yellow but you should not use dark background and a dark color text then it is not clear choice of the font 24 point aerial font is what is suggested references now it is a good practice in oral power point presentations to provide the reference right at the bottom of the slide okay because it does not make sense to provide references at the end it is not clear when you provide references at the end which part of the talk is using which reference okay in a paper it is quite okay to provide references at the end because I can always flip pages and then whenever I you know somewhere I come across reference number one I can flip pages and go to reference number one and see which reference are you talking about but in an oral presentation that is not possible so the reference should be provided at the bottom of the slide also it may not it is not possible to provide all details of the reference for example you can use the name of the first author the year of presentation the journal okay these details you can provide it may not be possible to provide the title because you know the it may take up space and if more details are to be given then those can be given at the end this slide is about answering questions and so on you can this self-explanatory you can go through this material yourself now some prescriptions how to improve communication skills oral communication so read allowed a newspaper for 10 minutes it is somewhat equivalent to practicing music right it is suggested if you are a vocalist for example you must practice for some amount of time sing daily now similarly if you want to improve your oral communication then you must read a newspaper allowed for 10 minutes now what is why a newspaper why not a book the point is in oral communication as far as possible you are asked to your suggest it is suggested that you use short sentences okay only for a variety occasionally you can put in long sentences but otherwise it is not a good idea to use long sentences so newspapers normally follow this kind of style since the main purpose of a newspaper is readability by a wide variety of wide audience okay so that language is very appropriate for oral communication so some of the other suggestions are given here you can go through them so this assignment was already done in the morning 10 minute oral presentation and feedback on that let me make a few points on writing so in fact this is true about not only writing but oral communication also that there is a link between communication and thinking in writing this comes out very very strongly so professor Sukath may for instance mentioned during his talk that you must give seminars and so on you must exchange ideas you must talk about your work to others and in the process you will gain some new ideas so like that while writing your own work you can get new ideas so here are a few points that have been based on research done on writing and thought so writing is the means of discovering new knowledge writing makes people think about their work in a different way the only time when we think is when we write in fact some people have said that only time we think this is not really true this is an exaggeration but still probably it is made to make a point to bring out the connection between writing and thought and a lot is written when little has been achieved so you are writing too long then nothing has been achieved and you are somehow trying to fill in space so some guidelines on what kind of form to choose and whether you should justify or not and things like that is self-explanatory one thing that I want to focus on is the emphasis sometimes some people who write tend to use too much of emphasis is an example of using too much emphasis right normally means of providing emphasis are using an underline or using bold letters or using italics or you know inserting a word between two stars two sets of stars now you can you can use any one of these methods not all of them right too much of emphasis is not good so this is again about effort that should be spent in choosing the titles of your thesis chapters and subsections and so on please go through this material writing methodology so there are two broadly two methodologies plan and write and think as you write so some people want to plan out in their mind a complete an outline of what they are going to write and only then they start writing on the other hand some other people feel more comfortable to think as you write so you write and then you think and then you write and so on now many times students get into the strap that they feel that they must spend a lot of time planning their writing and as a result they go on postponing the writing towards the end so my solution to students is you just start with the second mode okay if you have any difficulty you do not feel like starting off writing and you are procrastinating then you use this technique you just start writing something about the work that you want to write and as you go along you know you can go on modifying references now this is one thing that often students do not take care of reference should contain several pieces of information first is the names of authors then the title of the paper then the journal okay and which volume and page number and which month now the order in which this information has to be provided can be different for different journals so each journal has its own format but please note that all these details are important some journals do not require you to provide the title okay in that case you can avoid it but please take care to reference your work properly broadly there are two types of referencing one in which you number the references this is numbering scheme and second one is alphabetical scheme where the last name of the first author and the first word first letter of that name is taken as taken for sequencing okay so in such a case you must reorder the name as the last name followed by the first name okay so in this scheme for instance it is not correct to put the first name here first and then the last name the last name comes first there are advantages and disadvantages of each of these schemes advantage of a scheme like this in which you use an alphabet is that when you write your thesis as and when you want to insert references you can go on doing this right and after writing if you want to go back and you know insert a few more references this sort of an iteration can be done very easily with this scheme if you use a numbering scheme on the other hand if you want to insert a reference then all the numbers subsequent numbers have to be changed so that is one of the difficulties but of course nowadays software are available which do this automatically so morning I talk to you about graphs these are the various forms of graphs that are available you can use them in illustrations okay you can go in through this and in internet you can put this verse to see what kind of graphs they imply now one important thing is correcting your written reports to make it free of errors okay so this is something very very important many students falter on this count so they are not able to locate a spelling mistakes and promas and full stop they do not put at proper places now the difficulty is that even when they go through their reports a number of times they are not able to locate the mistakes now where is the problem the problem is what is indicated here you must achieve a psychological distance between your work your yourself and your writing so if you are too much we always get involved when we write out something and when you are involved in it you cannot locate false okay you cannot locate mistake so there should be some distance created between the your written work and yourself only then you can objectively look at the errors now there are several ways of creating the psychological distance one is that you must write your work and then sit it aside for a few days okay to come out of that and do something else and then you take a relook maybe after a week or 10 days then you will be able to locate the false easily another very easy method of locating mistakes is this which is very effective and I have myself found it very effective you read allowed what you have written as hearing reveals the difference between what you intended to say and what you actually said so when you read allowed your work you can locate mistakes grammatical mistakes and other mistakes very easily if some words are missing and so on these things show up so here are some prescriptions to improve your writing so read the editorial of newspapers daily the editorials of newspapers can are important because they express different ideas and in depth the expressions are normally are in depth and also they are of certain standard so the language used there is something very appropriate for thesis writing while the language used in newspaper reporting other than editorial portions is quite appropriate for oral communication for written communication it is the editorial that are good and you must practice writing for a couple of hours every week so these are some assignments that are given I want to remind you that beginning of my lectures I had mentioned that we are going to have a group discussion on you and your research this article by Richard Hamming so I hope you have located this article on the internet either the original article or the complete text the text of the complete talk or an abridged version of it now you can write a summary you can attempt to write a summary of this so tomorrow when you come for group discussion please summarize your points in a short form right you can use this as an exercise so writing summary of things that you read up is a good assignment to improve your written communication then there are some more assignments for references and so on preparing figures and references okay so with this we come to the end of communication skills I would like to have interaction with a couple of institutions on whatever we did on communication skills yes there were machine institute of technology and science potential does anyone have any comment or questions here here we have already discussed on the topic pertaining to the presentation of our communication particularly effective when we go we have to go through the newspapers editorial so we find that the editorials are in a continuous fashion generally they run in the form of a complex and compound sentences starting from the at one single point till the end of it but the thoughts will definitely flow in direction as you suggested it is a thought simultaneous writing activity but whereas when we come to the research while presenting I think I would like to have little details how this could be implemented thank you see let me see what best I can make out of your question right what you are saying is that the sentences used in editorials are complex right and you feel that they may not this language used in editorials may not be appropriate for writing research papers see as I said that the non-editorial portions where news reporting is done though that language is appropriate for oral communication right for oral communication I am not saying editorial language is appropriate but for written communication because generally editorials express an idea in detail right this something report this is something different from news reporting where facts are you know presented in terms of short sentences whereas editorials are expressing an idea okay so that is why that language and the way things are written that is more appropriate for writing thesis where also you are expressing your ideas in a written form so the editorial language is appropriate even though sometimes they use some complex or compound sentences well in thesis occasionally you can use such sentences because they may be required to express the idea properly yes DKTS Hichel Karanjee any comment or question what I have seen is that the thesis when writing the thesis many people are using so many capital words are so many words where the first letter is capitalized whereas it is not required will you please explain on this aspect whether it is correct or not for example if I am from the textile discipline wherever I find the word textile I will try to make it T capital whether that is correct or not I think on this guidelines are very clear that if you are using names of contributors then you use a capital first letter is capital similarly the starting of the sentence first letter is capital okay and only occasionally if you want to give emphasis then you use capital words in capital okay now evidently you would not like to emphasize every word or you would not like to give too much emphasis if in fact if you use if you try to emphasize too many words then things do will not get emphasized right because you get an emphasis if something is contrasted with reference to the background then whatever is different then that gets emphasis if you use capital letters as a matter of routine then you know you will not be able to emphasize so evidently that is not the correct good practice when the thesis book is written then the there is some limitation that we have to leave the spaces at the four margins I want to say margins is there any norm for that for top bottom left side and right side this is one thing another thing is that when we write the thesis at the end the people go on adding the appendices in which they add all the analysis statistical analysis which is done and that run into hundreds of pages is that necessary third question is that how much is it justified to add the tables of ANOVA analysis in the resultant discussion thank you over to you sir okay now see let me take up your first thing margins on these guidelines are readily available okay in fact if you take your there is a default margin setting already in the word files of the computer when we write on the computer when use the computer for prepare a document okay so yes some guidelines are there you can actually look into these guidelines you take an example thesis from any of the institutes like IIT or IITs and so on they have put up the guidelines for thesis writing on the internet okay you can use them for deciding things like margins and so on now coming to the appendix part see what is it that is pushed in the to the appendix now supposing you have a very detailed derivation of an equation then you would like to give the important steps okay in the main part main body of your thesis because it is important steps some key steps are important right all the details may not be that important to appreciate the idea on the other hand someone who is looking at your thesis in detail may like to go through the derivation and actually check whether the derivation is correct or use the same derivation method in his or her own work so in such a case the detailed derivation is also important for some people who are looking at your work in detail so for their benefit normally in the appendix you you know provide the detailed derivation so this is how normally appendix appendices are chosen okay so you give the key ideas or key chain of reasoning in the main body of your text about anything and then if there are some final details which they may be important for some people who are looking at your work in in depth then for their benefit you must provide the appendix now whether the appendix runs into tens of pages or hundreds I do not think any thesis can run into hundreds of pages in fact nowadays your thesis is not I don't find this is more than about 150 or you know 200 pages now it depends in your area I do not know what is the kind of guideline okay for thesis writing or what forms of thesis you get I am talking about thesis in engineering which I have reviewed or even in sciences physics chemistry and so on in humanities I do not know and your question is related to statistics your other questions okay and even you the kind of content you mentioned for the appendix also is related to statistics okay now I probably cannot answer that question because I am not so conversant with that particular aspect right if you are trying to give those details how long how many pages should it run into you could direct that question to some other speaker right who is going to discuss about use of statistics in research so the last part I think I will just leave it to someone else Indoor Institute of Engineering and Technology Medak sir I have a question like when we are preparing slides for presentation if we have too much of mathematics to be shown on this slide how efficiently and effectively can project it on the slide like in cases we have too much of mathematics we presented and and in and in few cases image processing and all there we talk more about application rather than in base image recognition okay I think I have got your question your question is taking time time for me to reach but I got the gist of your question you are asking about the use of mathematics or mathematical equations in slides okay so let me take this opportunity so use of equations in slides you see audience cannot follow mathematical derivations which are shown on the slide in detail similarly if there is too much of text also then it is difficult for audience to read because they have to listen to you while they are reading on the slide now that is not possible therefore slides should only contain minimum amount of text and minimum number of equations even if your work is mathematical you put the key ideas and spend more time explaining your equations those few equations which you are putting generally it is suggested that you must use illustrations very liberally in your slides in fact I mean as an extreme example a power point presentation can consist of only illustrations and diagrams even that would be fine but the other extreme where you have no illustrations and only text or only equations is completely unacceptable okay so for instance one of the comments about presentations one of the presentation in the morning was it had lot of text and it had only text no diagrams okay on the other hand you must try to express your slides should contain diagrams to illustrate ideas this the audience does not find distracting and in fact it is quite illustrative and it facilitates their understanding okay so to summarize text and equations they should be used minimally okay and the second thing is when you write equations or take care that the all the symbols used in the equations are visible okay so you must use an appropriate font or a you know enlarge the equation to sufficient extent so that you can all symbols are very clear NIT Kurukshetra I want to ask about the use of active and passive voice in communication in the first lecture also Mr. Sukhathami told that in commonly in general we use passive voice but actually I found in most of the western recommendations of people who are writing in journals that the active voice is more crisp you should prefer to use that so what's your take about that in fact I had a slide on the voice to be used whether it should be active or passive but I removed the slide because my recommendation was in contrast to recommendation given by professor Sukhathami in the in the first talk so you are right that there is a difference of opinion generally traditionally people have preferred passive voice okay but the younger lot and the more recent recommendation as far as the expression of language is concerned they suggest that you use active voice because then the sentences are shorter okay and it is believed that you know ideas communicated much more directly so increasingly the use of active voice is becoming more popular and I have also seen this recommendation in most recent books on communication that you must use active voice even in papers that I have reviewed I have seen recommendations by other reviewers where they have recommended use of active voice rather than passive voice but I have not seen the other way around that is reviewers recommending passive voice in fact I have seen negative recommendations saying that you know the paper uses too much of passive voice and so it makes it difficult to grasp the ideas presented there okay so so you can do you know you can take the recommendations professor Sukhathami said that passive voice probably is preferred but latest recommendations are use active voice Perumal Manimekali college yeah this is a question about registration of PhD or applying PhD whether the person is advisable or suggest to register PhD which will complete in time whether any pre-work has to be done before registration or what are all the problems which is faced by the researchers before without any pre-work this is my question let me reframe what what you have said you want to know whether there is any preparation required before registering for a PhD so that you will complete your PhD in time well according to the guidelines for it giving a degree the research work that you have carried out for which you want to get a PhD degree should actually be done after registration you understand so now this question is little bit tricky one because we are already saying that before you register for a PhD you should be a postgraduate MTech or MSC right so there we have already specified the level of preparation required so all that I can say is the only preparation is motivation I think I would put it like that if you are not motivated for doing a PhD then you will not complete it in time okay so this is very important please check whether you have a strong motivation for doing PhD and I have already explained what is meant by a strong motivation if it is a motivation for just gaining promotion or something the motivation is not strong enough right so unless you are in interested in the technical material right intellectual challenge doing something new if you have some interest in it like people are interested in music okay they are interested in music there they listen to songs and so on they spend time on music because it gives them satisfaction right not because they earn money by listening to songs similarly you must have a motivation you must enjoy doing research generating ideas so I would say that is a preparation that is required otherwise all other things choice of a problem choice of an area okay to work on all these things happen after registration the only other thing I would like to say is please do some groundwork to choose a good institution and an active institution researcher as a guide okay so there I think you should do some background work before registering because when you register you register under a guide so apart from motivation I would say that take special care to find out what kind of work is going on in the institution that you want to register and the person under whom you want to register this is important sir good evening sir I am Mr. Anandhan from India from Tamil Nadu I am a research scholar my area is the nano technology so in our India there is no possibility to finding the nano research sir most of the people are telling there is not available for machines and laboratories this is my question so my area is nano machining sir but I can't do for exceptional setup yes now I what I would say is you choose an area in which this sort of problem is not there right if you if you are restricting yourself to a particular area then this problem will be there why do you want to do only nano machining why can't you you know do something else in which a person like you with all the constraints can do some intellectual work yeah it is not necessary to be fascinated by you know an area and only stick to that certain institutions may have facilities there they may be you know doing research in some areas which require a lot of facilities same work may it may not be possible to do for some other person in a different institution so there is that is not that much of a problem in the sense you can always choose an area okay in which you can do some new contribution you understand so I would suggest that use spend some time in appreciating that how contributions are made in research what are the different forms of contribution what are the different areas in which contributions can be made okay so this survey you must do while reading the news while reading journal papers and so on you can get an idea about this and you locate some good journal papers out of them you find out those papers in which the kind of work that has been done has required minimum amount of facilities expensive facilities and then you can do choose that kind of a problem to work on so you should spend time in doing literature survey and different types of problems that have been solved okay I would suggest that is a one more question sir we are from the same college for doing the research for doing the research work PhD to get the PhD is it possible for the government of India to form a general criteria for all the universities no I think the you see it is like this what is the meaning of a PhD thesis it has been given in so many words right what is it that constitutes a thesis so that is sufficient for all universities the quality of research has to be more or less of a good standard right otherwise because it's after all a PhD this is the final education degree that one gets unlike B.Tech or M.Tech so whether a government can formulate an area such a thing or not is is not something that I can answer it is for the government to say but we can always have guidelines for ourselves so what you can do is take up an institution like IIT which is in India right and see what criteria they are using for awarding PhD degrees that can be a reference for you you try to maintain similar criteria for doing your research yes you have some more constraints I understand that so probably some dilution may be acceptable but not beyond a limit for instance in IIT you should have at least two good journal publications if you want to submit a PhD thesis this is a broadly the criterion that is used now in your case maybe we can reduce it to one good journal publication and maybe if you conference publications right but it cannot be no journal publications I think that would not be a good does standard anywhere in any university so a reviewed peer reviewed journal publication is important where a review process is good merely conference publications ordinary conference publications cannot be guidelines for cannot be sufficient criteria for PhD yes I am asking this why can't we follow a general criteria throughout India it varies from university to university see yes I understand now can you tell me an example of a common criterion that can be followed I think this is sufficiently common right I have said two good journal publications or at least one good journal publication and few conference publications for outside non IIT or non IIC you know which are not centers of excellence institutions of excellence I think that is good enough common criterion see as far as the period is concerned the only problem with the period is with the it has to do with the scholarship right so that is why what the government is saying is it has decided it will give some amount of money for doing research and you divide that money in to the number of years and give the scholarship accordingly right so you want to take longer fine your money is going to be spread over a longer period okay some amount of money is is fixed I think that is a reasonable criterion because money is an issue after all another thing you should note is that if the you take too long to do your research problem then there are then you may not be able to produce a thesis for several reasons one is you have started on some problem and you know the progress is happening at an advance at a rapid pace so the kind of problem they have taken may become irrelevant if you take too long to submit your thesis that is one issue if you take too long another thing is you may not be able to sustain your interest for very long so therefore normally the guidelines are that you complete your research between within 4 to 6 years I think more than that you should not take okay so now I think we will halt our discussions