- E1 Put two white spaces after a sentence. (in LaTeX source for easy reading)
- E2 You shouldn't use contraction when writing papers.
- E3 And never start a sentence with “And”
- E4 Captalize “Section” “Chapter” “Table” “Figure” etc. when refer to a specific item. “Section 1”, not “section 1”. Leave a space between “Section” and the section number.
- E5 “Cannot” should be one word, cannot use “can not”.
- E6 Capitalize section/chapter/paper titles, but leave common noun in small case (“a”, “on”, “of” etc)
- E7 Do not use dangling “This”. Wrong: “This creates a new environment...” Right: “This method creates a new environment..”
- E8 Italize the any special terms that you are introducing. Do not use bold.
- E9 Use (i), (ii), not i) ii).
- E10 Capitalize proper noun. Internet, Web are proper nouns.
- E11 Use “that” in restrictive clause (to add essential information about the noun before), and “which” in a non-restrictive clause (additional info, non-essential to the meaning of the sentence). Always put a comma before “which” when use in a non-restrictive clause.
- E12 Series comma: put a comma before “and” “or” if there are more than two items. Correct: “A and B” “A, B, and C”. Wrong “A, B and C”.
- E13 Make sure you have one space before ”(” or ”[” when using them in text (instead of math).
- E14 Don't start a sentence with “However” unless you mean “Anyhow”. Wrong: However, this method does not work. Correct: This method, however, does not work.
- E15 Compound adjectives should be hyphenated. For example, content-aware networking, user-centric approaches, etc.
- F1 Never use cartoon-ish clip arts
- F2 Make sure you label the x- and y‑axis of your plots (with units if applicable)
- F3 Never use color graphs when writing paper that are going to be printed in black and white. F4 Never include a figure, yet not refering to it in the text body.
- B1 Citations are not nouns. Do not use ”[1] describes this and that”, use “Zhang and Smith describe this and that [1].” Leave a space between words and the citations.
- B2 Each bibliography entry should be complete. Each one needs authors, paper title, year, month. For conference, you need proceedings title, location, and page number (if applicable). For journal, you need journal title, volume number and issue number.
- B3 Make sure any words that should be captalized, is capitalized properly in bibliography entries (e.g. TCP, WWW, MPEG).
- B4 Make sure you spell the authors name properly!
- B5 Make sure the format of proceedings/journal names are consistent, i.e., don't say “Proc. MM'99” in one entry and use “in the Proceedings of 13th ACM International Conference on Multimedia” in another.
- B6 Whenever space permits (e.g., in thesis or GRP where there is no page limit), use full conference and journal names.
- S1 Make sure abstract summarizes the whole paper/report. Don't just motivate your work in abstract.
- S2 Make sure you describe your contribution early. (Perhaps in a succint form in the introduction.)
- T1 When you use an abstract noun that is formed by adding noun-forming suffixes to a verb, you can often use the verb direcly. E.g.,
- “We perform a measurement on the latency..” → “We measure the latency”
- “We can draw a conclusion that” → “We can conclude that”
- “We take into consideration the following..” → “We consider the following..”
- “We conduct a simulation of the system” → “We simulate the system”
- “This section presents a description on..” → “This section describes..”
- “We perform a comparison and then an addition on the values if ..” → “We compare and add the values if..”