Finishing the LaTeX Project

Week 6 studio: finish your replication in latex-project/, polish it, render the short paper, and submit

A short studio reading for Week 6, the second and final week of the LaTeX Project. This week is about finishing: taking the scaffold you stood up in Week 5 and turning it into a polished short paper. The exact project prompt, rubric, deadline, submission details, and extension procedures live in the Assignments/LMS space.

Week 5 was planning and scaffolding. Week 6 is finishing.

By now your latex-project/ folder — set up last week — has a title block, a project plan, an annotated outline, a references.bib with your source, and a clean skeleton PDF render. This week you replace the placeholders with the actual replication, add only the apparatus your unit needs, polish the prose, render the polished PDF, and submit.

There is no new tool this week. You stay in Quarto .qmd, rendering to PDF exactly as you have since Week 1. (Raw .tex is still optional and not part of the project.)

What “finishing” looks like

A finished LaTeX Project is a polished short paper of a few pages. It has:

a title block with your name;
a short introduction naming the source paper and the self-contained unit you replicated;
the setup or definitions the unit needs to be self-contained;
the replicated unit — the theorem and its proof, the derivation, the figure-with-exposition, or the short passage — in your own words and notation;
at least one own-words explanation paragraph in plain prose, so a reader who has not opened the source can follow what the unit says and why it matters;
in-text citations to the source, and an auto-generated References section that resolves cleanly;
a captioned figure or table only if your unit needs one — see the next section;
an AI Use Note with three labeled lines — Tool, Purpose, Verification.

The target is “polished short paper, a few pages.” The grader should be able to read it from the top as a stranger and follow it without opening the source.

Finish, don’t add

The most common Week 6 mistake is the pull to add more in the last few days — a second unit, a longer Discussion, an extra figure, a sidebar derivation. That turns a polished short paper into an unpolished long one.

By now your unit is locked. Replicate the unit you locked, in your own words, with the source cited, and stop. A clear, tight replication of one self-contained unit is the project. If the unit you chose in Week 5 no longer feels manageable, cut it down to a smaller piece of the same source rather than starting over with a new paper.

Apparatus on demand

You spent Week 4 building captioned figures, captioned tables, and citations with cross-references. Those are tools, not a checklist for this week. Use them only where your chosen unit needs them.

If your unit is a figure or a table — for example, you are replicating a figure and its surrounding exposition — include it, caption it, and cross-reference it where you discuss it in prose.
If your unit is a theorem and its proof, a derivation, or a short passage that does not need a figure or table, do not add one for the sake of having one.
Cite the source with [@yourkey] and let the auto-generated References section appear at the end. The same Week 4 pattern.

A good short paper uses apparatus where the unit calls for it and leaves it out where it does not — a figure for a figure-and-exposition unit, no figure for a proof that does not need one.

Reading the rendered PDF as the grader will

The PDF is the artifact. The clean-render habit from Weeks 1–4 is now load-bearing.

Before you submit, open latex-project.pdf and read it from the top as a stranger would. Confirm:

the title block and your name appear;
the introduction names the source and the unit clearly;
the setup / definitions are tight and serve the unit;
the replicated unit is present, in your own words and notation, and follows step by step;
there is at least one explanation paragraph in plain prose;
every place you lean on the source has a citation, and the References section at the end lists the source — no ??, no [?], no empty list;
any figure or table you used is captioned and cross-referenced where you mention it in prose;
the AI Use Note is present with the three labeled lines.

If anything is off, fix it in the source and re-render. The skeleton that rendered cleanly in Week 5 will keep rendering cleanly all week if you change one thing at a time and look at the PDF after each change.

Common debugging checks

The five most common late-week failures and one-line fixes:

References section is empty or missing. Confirm bibliography: references.bib is in your YAML, that references.bib is in the same folder as latex-project.qmd, and that your [@key] matches the key in the .bib file.
?? somewhere in the PDF. A citation key or a cross-reference label does not match. Make [@yourkey] match the .bib key exactly; make @fig-foo match the #fig-foo on the figure.
A figure does not appear. The image path is wrong. Keep image files inside latex-project/ and use a relative path from latex-project.qmd.
The math looks ugly. VS Code may have opened the file as Plain Text. Confirm Quarto or Markdown in the lower-right of VS Code (and that the Quarto extension is installed), then re-render.
A render that worked last night fails today. Roll back to the last clean state and re-apply your edit in smaller steps until you find the change that broke it.

For a longer walkthrough of the rendering toolchain, see Software setup.

AI in the finishing week

AI assistants are useful for the finishing work: they can tighten prose, catch a math typo, debug a render error, suggest a transition, or re-explain a step in the source in plain language that you then re-write in your own words and notation.

There are two things AI must not do this week:

Invent or replace your mathematics. If the assistant offers a “cleaner” proof or derivation that is not in your source, you are no longer replicating your source. Stick to the unit you cited.
Generate citations you did not verify. AI fabricates DOIs, journals, page numbers, and authors. Anything in references.bib is your responsibility to confirm — the same rule as Week 5.

The three-line AI Use Note (Tool / Purpose / Verification) applies, and this week the load-bearing Verification line shifts. In Week 5 you verified your source was real and open; in Week 6 you verify your replication is faithful to that source. A useful Week-6-shaped Verification example:

Verification: opened the source PDF and re-read the proof of Theorem 1 line by line, confirmed each algebra step in my replication matches the source’s, and rendered the polished PDF and confirmed the title block, the Theorem 1 statement, the proof, the citation, and the References section all appear with no ??.

If you did not use AI, write “did not use AI” on the Tool line and leave the other two blank or N/A.

See the AI use guidelines for the course’s full position.

This week continues the Week 5 project scaffold

The LaTeX Project picks up directly from the Week 5 pre-draft. You should already have a chosen open-access source, a scoped self-contained unit, and a clean skeleton render of latex-project/ — that is the material you finish this week.

If your scaffold is incomplete, contact me through the course LMS immediately. The Week 6 project standard is the same regardless, and the exact project procedures (including how to flag an incomplete scaffold) live in the course LMS.

Projects, deadlines, and extensions

A few syllabus reminders, framed for the finishing week:

The LaTeX Project is not droppable. Projects sit outside the weekly best-9-of-11 drop pool.
Extensions for projects require a request submitted before the due date, granted at the instructor’s discretion. The weekly 20%/one-week-late rule does not automatically apply to this project.
If something genuinely unexpected is going to keep you from finishing on time, ask before the deadline. The exact request procedure is in the course LMS.

The exact prompt, rubric, point breakdown, file-naming contract, submission area, due date, and extension procedure are in the course LMS.

What you’ll do this week

In one paragraph: you will open the latex-project/ folder you scaffolded in Week 5, replace the outline placeholders with the actual replication of your one self-contained unit, write at least one own-words explanation paragraph, add a figure or table only if your unit needs one, polish the prose, re-render the polished PDF, inspect it as the grader will, and submit the folder in the course LMS.