Guidelines to writing your first research paper

Following are some of the common mistakes which students make when writing their first research paper.

Acronyms definitions need to be capitalised properly, so one can tell which letters lead to the acronym. So it should be "General Purpose Languages (GPLs)" not "general purpose languages (GPLs)". Acronyms - The first letter of the words that form the acronym should be upper case. Also, leave a space between the words that form the acronym and the following opening bracket. For eg: World Wide Web (WWW)

Use of hyphens.

Sub clauses (-- sub clause --) and therefore ( --- therefore). In LaTeX, single hyphens are only used to join words (e.g: compile-time). But "something -- sub-clause -- and something else" need double hyphens and "therefore---a conclusion" needs triple hyphens (and no space around it). An example for using --: The constructs -- \texttt{t.from\_state 'locked'} and \texttt{t.to\_state = 'locked'} -- which look like DSL keywords. An example for using ---: The term-rewriting is performed by the transformation program at the preprocessor stage---a stage prior to the compilation of the end language (e.g. Java).

Use of semi-colon to break a long sentence into two short ones. Explain with an example.

Use of colon to list items. For e.g: The Object class enables dynamic dispatch in every object by defining two methods: responds_to? checks if an object will respond to a message; and method_missing catches messages an object has no explicit handler for.

If you need to refer to an abstract person, use "one" not "you". So it should be "that lets one define anonymous functions" not "that lets you define anonymous functions".

Maintain consistency of tense. For example "which when passed through pretty-printing module, would result in" should be "which when passed through pretty-printing module will result in".

Programs are proper nouns and therefore capitalised (unless the language has a weird name). e.g. Converge has a capital C. Proper nouns (places, names, and so on) are capitalised. So are acronyms. But most other things aren't.

Code within paragraphs should be in \texttt{...}.

Example of when should you use \texttt{} and when to use \emph{}?

Avoid florid style of writing. For instance, use of words such as "powerful" should be avoided as much as possible.

Most of the journals have a limitation on the size of the paper. For instance, some of the workshops at the ETAPS conference have a limitation of 8 to 10 pages. So, what can be done to keep the paper short? Here are few guidelines:

Size of the diagrams - Try to optimise the size of the diagram.
Similarly, try to keep the size of the tables as small as possible.
Number of bibliographical items - One can save few lines by removing a bibliographical item. For instance, if one has two bib items that refer to two books on Ruby, then one of them can be removed.
Also use abbreviations for journal names. For eg: LNCS for Lecture Notes in Computer Science.
Look for paragraphs where the last line has very few words that can be squeezed into the previous line. This will save you a line.
Make sure you are using the correct font size. Most of the conferences use font size 11 but it is generally a good idea to confirm the font size. Increasing or decreasing the font size can make a huge difference to the size of the paper.
Look for big paragraphs and work you way though the sentences to make the sentences compact. The usual tricks are: re-arrange the sentences to avoid duplication of content; try to minimise the use of words such as "for instance" (use e.g.), "more importantly".