How to submit written assignments

Timing and placement

• Contributions for general consumption (such as the "standing assignment" to report interesting things you read in your general history book) should be posted in the WebCT Discussions right away.
• Weekly homework (such as the magic square problem) and major papers (book review, etc.) should be sent to me privately. Do not post them in WebCT before the due date. On or after the due date they may be posted; should they be? Probably other students are not interested in your routine homework papers, but the book reviews will be of general interest.

Formats

Communicating mathematical symbolism electronically is a scandalous headache. Different students will have different software and expertise available, so I do not aspire to impose uniformity.

1. Paper mail and Fax should be avoided unless really necessary. Occasionally you may need to send a hand-written diagram or (less likely in this course) a long hand-written calculation.
2. E-mail attachments will probably be the most common mode, whether you are mailing things to me or installing them in WebCT Discussion folders. Various formats are possible. I am very much a T_EX partisan, but I understand that many students will need to use something like Microsoft Word.
   • I've been advised that a good method is to use Word or some other word processor with an equation editor, and to export the file in .rtf format (more portable than .doc or whatever the processor's proprietary format is).
   • If you can produce a .pdf file, that is probably the most widely readable, apart from HTML.
   • You can make an HTML file. The mathematical typesetting available within HTML is primitive but often adequate (note the subscript on "TeX" above). There are editors that make the process easier (but I am largely ignorant of them).
   • Sometimes (especially in informal e-mail) it is enough to write plain ASCII text with the mathematics in pidgin TeX.
3. For various reasons, it may sometimes be better to install your paper on a personal Web page and e-mail the URL to me (and, when appropriate, the class).