Writing Correctness and Style Pet Peeves Tamara Munzner Correctness - whether to hyphenate a noun phrase depends on how it is used. Use "foo bar" when a noun phrase is used as a noun, and "foo-bar" when the phrase is used as an adjective. Correct: "we lay out elements end to end in a line" (noun), "we make an end-to-end argument as in networking" (adjective). - "lay out" is a verb. "layout" is a noun. Correct: "we lay out the graph splendidly" (verb use), "the layout is splendid because" (noun use). - citations are grammatically invisible, you shouldn't use them for nouns. - "it's" is a contraction for "it is", not a possessive - avoid contractions in formal technical writing - every figure must be referenced in the main body text - please get principal/principle right. principal = main, principle = idea. PCA stands for Principal Components Analysis. PI stands for Principal Investigator. References - in a bibliography, always always hand-check bibtex that you get off the web. it's usually inconsistent or incomplete. be consistent with journal/conference names. no need for publisher address unless it's someplace obscure, and no need for publisher if it's implicit in the conf/journal name (i.e. ieee/acm). always doublecheck that the pages are in there (both the start and end page!). also be concise and consistent: 'Trans.' not 'Transactions', 'Symp.' not 'Symposium', 'Conf.' not 'Conference'. don't include words like "of the" or "on". Don't ever say 'pages', just 'p.' do include the accepted nickname/shortname for conferences in parentheses after the long name. don't include the year after that nickname, it's already communicated by the year that comes at the end of the citation. example of bad bibliography snarfed off the web: "M. Wattenberg. A note on space-filling visualizations and space-filling curves. In Proc. of the IEEE Symposium on Information Visualization (INFOVIS’05), volume 0, page 24, Los Alamitos, CA, USA, 2005. IEEE Computer Society." after fixing: "M. Wattenberg. A note on space-filling visualizations and space-filling curves. In Proc. IEEE Symp. Information Visualization (InfoVis), p 181-186, 2005" if you're pressed for space, change long author lists to 'FirstAuthor et al'. I normally do full names for four or less, and switch to et al for five or more. The way to do this in latex is "John Smith and others" for author list. make sure that you've got the right capitalization in titles using curly braces to escape stuff. Main offenders are "D" (3D, ND), acronyms, and camelcase names. in short: check your bibliography *very carefully*. do not be sloppy and inconsistent. be assured that i will notice. Style The issues below are stylistic choices - I'm not saying the other way is technically incorrect, I'm saying I have such a strong preference for this way that I will change it whenever I edit. - avoid parentheses whenever possible, they interrupt flow. It's OK to use them when defining acronyms, but otherwise I try to hold myself to only one parenthetical remark per paper. - avoid e.g. and i.e., spell out "such as" or "for example" instead. Again, it's a flow issue. - minimize use of possessives with nouns. So instead of "feature's sequences", say "sequences of a feature". it's easier to parse. - avoid "this" without a noun after it, especially at the beginning of a sentence. Instead of "This shows that we are fabulous", say "This situation shows that we are fabulous", to make the referent unambiguous. - always use the Oxford/serial comma with lists. instead of "we have apples, oranges and bananas for sale", say "we have apples, oranges, and bananas for sale". The final comma is critical for resolving ambiguity in some situations. Like this one: http://www.outsidethebeltway.com/merle-haggard-and-the-gay-serial-comma/ - avoid the passive voice, use active voice. passive voice makes your text too ambiguous about who is the agent of action. - must have some prose between section and subsection header - avoid "in this section we do XXX". just *do* XXX! - emphasize a word when you first *define* it, not when you first *use* it. ideally the definition and the first use are the same. but it might be a sentence or two later. - firstly vs. first is admittedly an issue of personal preference. i strongly prefer the latter. let me bring your attention to a quote from Elements of Style: "Do not dress words up by adding 'ly' to them, as though putting a hat on a horse." - avoid double negatives, use a positive instead because it's easier to parse - use parallel structure when possible, both at the level of sentences in a paragraph and at the level of section naming. Correct: Naming Foo, Linking Bar, Adding Bat. Incorrect: Name Foo, Linking Bar, Bat Additions. - avoid switching between tenses unless you have a very good reason to do so. usually what you're reporting on in the paper should stay in the present tense (Correct: "the system is designed to do foo". Incorrect: "the system was designed to do foo".) past tense should be reserved for things truly in the past, like what users did during a user study. - for captions, use boldface type then colon to distinguish subfigure labels {"Top Right:"}. Always have a (possibly short) bit saying what the full figure does before starting with subfigure descriptions. Each subfigure should have its own label, rather than having a continuing sentence where you mention subfigure bits as you go. Correct: "Key aspects of foobar. {\bf Top Left:} The first thing. {\bf Top Right:} The second thing." Incorrect: "The first thing (top left), and the second thing (top right)". - plus everything that John Owens says here: http://www.ece.ucdavis.edu/~jowens/commonerrors.html - plus everything in the splendid grammar book _Bugs in Writing_ by Lyn Dupre