CSCE 181 Lecture 2

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Style

Avoid verbosity Avoid passive voice in favor of active voice, but try not to use first person. Avoid verbs: "perform", "utilize", "achieved", "carried out", "conducted", "occurred", and "effected"

Exercise

original sentence: "When we conducted the experiment it showed that our conjecture was correct"
prof's correction: "The experiment showed that our conjecture was correct"
my correction: "Experimental results support the hypothesis"

Tone

Keep paragraphs short:

make a Point
Illustrate (use examples if necessary)
Explain the example and how it relates to

Avoid "popular science" language:

Exercises

original sentence: "The results show that, for the given data, less memory is likely to be required by the new structure, depending on the magnitude of the numbers to be stored an the access pattern."
prof's correction: "The results show that less memory was required by the new structure. Whether this result holds for other data sets will depend on the magnitude of the numbers and the access pattern, but we expect that the new structure will usually require less memory than the old."
my correction: "The new structure requires less memory, but the actual usage will vary depending on the magnitude of the numbers and the access pattern."

original sentence: "As each value is passed to the server, the 'heart' of the system, it is checked to see whether it is in the appropriate range."
prof's correction: "Each value passed to the central server is checked to see whether it is in the appropriate range."
my correction: "A server verifies that each value is in the appropriate range"

Examples

Use examples where it clarifies the meaning of a sentence.

Motivation

Ask yourself as a reader: "Why the *** should I read this document? WTF is this document about?" (profanity helps keep your answers to the point)

The reader is not stupid, so don't repeat ideas!

Professor's Example: Introduce with

In this section, we describe a simple but robust vision algorithm to extract the locations of the retro-reflective markers from two synchronized video cameras. We then describe the subject calibration process that makes the vision-based interface robust to users of different sizes and to variations in marker placement.

Conclude with

Together these results show that the hypothesis holds for line[a]r coefficients. The difficulties presented by non-linear coefficients are considered in the next section.

Straw Men

Do not say that your algorithm is better than bad algorithms. That mean's nothing!

Technical Document/Paper Structure

Title
Abstract (1-2 ¶'s: Why the **** should I read this paper?) (written last)
Introduction (larger abstract)
Background or Related Work (compare your stuff to existing stuff)
Algorithm/System Description
Experiments & Results
Conclusion & Discussion (describe limitations/errors/interesting results)
References