Dave's Writing Guidelines

Over the years I have collected a few thoughts on the preparation of research papers, and listed some of the most common mistakes that I find in people's papers (mine too!).  So I list them here for easy reference.

Format:

Structure:

While these comments should nothing new, I've found it helpful to remember the following things.   They largely apply to expository writing, of the type we encounter in this course.

Usage:

Here are some things that I commonly find a need to mark on student papers (and my own too!).  I tend to mark only the first one or two occurrences of any given mistake in any given paper.  I don't try to explain all of them fully here; see some of the books below for specific advice about English usage.  Day's books are particularly good for learning the conventions used in scientific writing.  Here are a few of the most common mistakes that I have noticed.  I number them because I may refer to these numbers when marking your paper.  If you see me mention SW12, that's a reference to Strunk and White, section 12.
  1. Check your spelling!  You're writing the paper on a computer, a computer that can check your spelling.  Use the spell checker!  It can catch many typos.
  2. Hyphenate compound words that are used as an adjective.  For example, in "open-book exam", the phrase "open book" is used as an adjective for the noun "exam."  These hyphens are used much like parentheses; "open-book exam" is read like "((open book) exam), whereas "open book exam" is read "(open (book exam))", not the likely meaning.
  3. Be careful how you use "which" and "that".  "Which" nearly always follows a comma, because it is used to add information, whereas "that" is used to qualify:
    4. In the first sentence, there is only one ball involved, and we mention almost as an aside that it is a red ball.  In the second sentence, there are presumably many balls involved, but it is the red ball that fell down the hole.  The following sentence is ungrammatical:
  4. Avoid the passive sentence structure.  It obscures the subject of the sentence, and leads to ambiguity. See Dupré 1, SW11.
  5. Do not use contractions in formal writing.
  6. Avoid verbosity (see SW13):
    1. "In order to..." becomes "To..."
    2. "At this point in time" becomes "At this time"
    3. "a number of" becomes "several"
  7. Do not underline words and phrases.  For emphasis, foreign words, etc., use italics.
  8. The abbreviations "i.e.", "e.g.", "etc.", "vs.", are indeed abbreviations and thus should have periods as shown.  Of those, "i.e.", "e.g.", should always be followed by a comma, as should "etc." when in the middle of the sentence.  (Why? because they replace "that is", "for example", and "and so forth", which are always delimited by commas (SW3).)  At the end of a sentence I prefer to use "and so forth" rather than "etc.."
  9. If you want to mention a URL...
    1. do not place it inline, in the text.  Put it in a footnote, or a reference at the end of the paper.  A footnote is nice because the font is generally smaller, and it starts on a new line, so the URL can generally fit in one line and not mess up the line-wrapping in the text.  Plus, few people actually want to read a URL, though they still might want it handy for reference.
    2. Avoid URLs that refer to CGI scripts, as these tend to have a short lifetime.
    3. If the URL is for a publication (book, article, magazine, news story), give a full traditional citation of the publication itself , but include the URL for the reader's convenience.
  10. Do not end a clause or sentence with a preposition (with, for, to, from, under, on, in, and so forth). See Dupré 60.
  11. "This" should almost always be followed by a noun: instead of saying "this is red", you should be more specific with "this ball is red."  If you leave it out, your reader may mentally insert a different noun than you had in mind... things that are not ambiguous to you can be ambiguous to your reader.
  12. It is rarely useful to use the word "very".  How much hotter than "hot" is "very hot"?  This story may be apocryphal, but Mark Twain once said that he would just replace "very" with "damn" everywhere, and then the editor would surely take them all out.
  13. "However" should (usually) not begin a sentence: rewrite "However, I found that the red ball had been missing for weeks" as "I found, however, that the red ball had been missing for weeks". Then, note that "however" should be surrounded by commas.  It is ok for it to be at the end of a sentence, however.
  14. It is rarely appropriate to say "whether or not"; usually you should just say "whether".  If you do use "whether or not", don't spread the words across the sentence.  See Dupré 73.
  15. When writing about general interconnected computer networks, call it the internet (not capitalized). When writing about the specific public internet that is based on the IP protocol, call it the Internet.  The Internet is an instance of all internets.  Unfortunately it is common, though technically incorrect, to equate the Internet and the World-Wide Web (which is also capitalized, please note).  The WWW is a subset of the Internet.
  16. When referring to other parts of your paper, use present tense.  That is, do not say, "This paper will discuss...", say, "This paper discusses...".  Similarly, say, "The argument above proves that..." rather than "The argument above proved that...".  Why?  Because, despite the fact that your reader is reading through the paper, over time, the paper stands complete, in the present.  The argument not only proved, but still proves...

Recommended books: