This is a list of comments on some stylistic issues for master theses
and similar documents that I am supposed to examinate.
Most of these were compiled from a collection of frequently encountered stylistic errors
in previous master theses.
My suggestions are based on scientific writing conventions used
by international publishers in computer science and engineering.
Most of these points concern both English and Swedish.
As a general reference for proper writing in English, I recommend
Heffernan, Lincoln, Atwill: Writing, A College Handbook. 5th ed., Norton, 2001
or similar books.
Unfortunately, many students seem to confuse
background literature with related work.
The latter only applies to studies that try to answer the same or similar (related) research questions as your project, i.e., these are your "competitors" that you will compare your results with.
In particular, manuals, textbooks, survey articles etc.
for theory, systems and techniques that you (and likewise your competitors)
use for the work
are not related work (but should nevertheless be cited).
These are background literature.
For the related work section in your thesis,
you should consider, cite and discuss published
approaches that have been done in the same or a slightly different
problem context, e.g., investigated the same question for a different processor
architecture, programming language, or for a variant of the
algorithmic problem considered that is, for example,
more general or more special than yours.
Then you can relate your own experimental evaluations and conclusions to those
works and explain the similarities and differences, strengths and
weaknesses, thereby leading to
a proper related work discussion chapter in your thesis and
possibly stronger conclusions.
The related work chapter should be at least 3-4 pages long.
I do not allow citing (and thus using material from)
Wikipedia and other public web lexica, blogs etc. in final thesis reports.
Such material is too volatile,
not generally trustworthy and the presentation may be biased.
For instance, I recently traced an error made in an exam by several students
back to an erroneous article in such a web lexicon.
Wikipedia may still be useful as a starting (!) point for a first
literature search
about a topic, but you should read and cite the original articles mentioned
there (and of course also others that are not mentioned by that article's authors).
Do not consider and do not cite papers from predatory conferences or journals. In the same way as your work gains in trust from citing strong, well-published papers and building upon them, citing papers from predatory conferences or journals add "smell" to your work. At least, you will have to show awareness of such potential weaknesses where you discuss the quality of the literature sources used in your thesis.
Examples: "We have shown in previous work [3,4] that..." - "We will see that..." - "Let us consider now ..."
If you want to mark something as your own personal opinion or experience,
you should speak of yourself in the third person:
"The author thinks that ..."
Never use "you" to directly address the reader,
and never command the reader by using imperative form.
Also here the third person is appropriate to keep the necessary distance:
"The reader may have noticed that ..." -
"We refer the interested reader to ..."
Hence, choose a descriptive title without abbreviations, even if the title becomes a bit longer.
Positive example: Parallelization of the interpreter in a test system for mobile telecommunication components
In your own interest, I am fussy about orthography, grammar, and consistency of terminology, and I will reject a thesis with more than 15 typos on a page.
Please use a spell checker and, if possible, ask someone else (not your opponent) to proofread your thesis before you hand it in to me.
"It was shown that this problem is NP-complete."
If you use active tense instead, you will be forced to name the author:
"Cook [23] has shown that this problem is NP-complete."
An additional clustering of the chapters into multiple parts may be suitable for textbooks with more than 400 pages, but never for a thesis.
Sections and subsections are usually numbered up to a nesting
depth of 3 or 4.
Hence, "Section 3.1.4" looks still fine, while "Section 3.1.5.1.2.1.1"
does not.
LaTeX automatically enforces this standard.
Avoid phrases that do not really add information. Keep the quality and precision of the presentation but minimize the length.
Bad example: Just this.
This rule applies also to enumerations. Hence, avoid incomplete sentences as in
Memory types:
* Data memory. Contains...
* Program memory. Is ...
instead, you should write
The memory types are the following:
* Data memory. The data memory contains...
* Program memory. The program memory is ...
Hence, choose a few very central abbreviations that you want to keep, introduce them with their full name properly before their first use, and spell out the others.
Long listings in verbatim mode (typewriter font)
are hard to read.
I recommend to use the available stylistic features to structure
program code, such as boldface font for key words, italics for variable and
function names, slanted for comments, etc.
LaTeX has good packages for typesetting algorithms.
Avoid overlong names for variables
and constants, especially if you need to reference them in mathematical formulas.
Line numbers should only be used if the describing plain text
explicitly references them.
Avoid page breaks in algorithms / listings. Treat them as floating objects, like tables and figures.
Avoid excessively long algorithms or program listings. Partition the algorithm into suitable parts and package the parts into separate listings/figures.
If you present an algorithm that you invented,
"see Figure 3 for ..." - "as shown in Section 2.3"
Here, "Figure 3" is a proper name and thus the first character is capitalized.
but:
"see the third figure ..." - "see the previous section"
Here, "figure" is an ordinary noun.
Note that numeric citations are to be treated as comments (like footnote superscripts), not as independent text objects. I also recommend to add some text that simplifies reading without looking up the corresponding bibitem in the bibliography.
Hence, you may write
"Applying Brent's theorem [7] yields ..." or "see Cormen et al. [4]"
but not
"[7] yields ..." nor "see [4]"
as [7] by itself is just an optional comment, not a subject.
A minor issue is that multiple numeric references should appear in order, that is, [3,4] instead of [4,3]. As the bibliography should be sorted in alphabetical order (of the first author's last name), this means citation symbols should preserve this alphabetical ordering, too.
Long flat lists of references are not a good citation style.
For instance,
"A lot of loop transformations have been developed to increase data locality,
for example [3], [5], [6], [7], [10], [11], [12], [13], [16], [17], [20], [21], [22]."
Instead, more effort should be put in reviewing and structuring the related work,
even if this needs more time and space:
"Many loop transformations have been proposed in the literature of the last
two decades. For instance, Kennedy et al. [10] give an in-depth treatment
of loop interchange. Tiling of multidimensional loops is discussed in
a seminal paper by Wolf and Lam [21].
Polychronopoulos [13] proposes cycle shrinking for
loops with dependence cycles of static distances larger than one.
Banerjee [5,6] gives an introduction to the theory of unimodular transformations.
Ancourt and Irigoin [3] introduce the polytope model for the representation
of index spaces, which is used in
subsequent work by Lengauer [16], Xue [22], ... . See also Wolfe's textbook
[20] for a comprehensive overview."
Please note also that there should be a blank space before each
citation reference symbol, such as here [47]
(in the LaTeX source: before each \cite{} command).
If the citation reference symbol comes last in a sentence,
the period comes directly after it [19].
Never put a citation after the last period at the end of a paragraph,
this has a strong smell of unreflected copy-and-paste (or worse, of plagiarism)
of the whole paragraph.
Avoid citing web documents, give preference to properly published (e.g., printed) books and articles. Note that web documents are (with very few exceptions) highly volatile, subject to dynamic update or removal without notice, and generally unrefereed; hence they are much less trustworthy than printed publications, which underwent a thorough reviewing process and can thus be regarded as correct and original work (also with very few exceptions). My own experience (admittedly, based on a small sample size) shows that, on the average, a significant share of cited web page URLs have changed or do no longer exist after a few years. A printed book (with an ISBN) or a journal article exist, in principle, forever. Likewise, the DOI for a published paper is expected to be valid for a long time.
For each (non-web) bibitem, give the author, title, the year of publication, and the publisher. The ISBN is optional and usually dropped. This is standard for scientific writing. Note that I override here the IDA guidelines.
For articles, give also journal name, volume, issue, and page numbers.
For papers in conference proceedings, give the conference name and
the page numbers.
For theses, technical reports and white papers,
give the responsible institution/organization's name and location.
If you cannot avoid citing a web document (such as online documentation), give the author/organization, the year, and the location of the project (e.g., university or research institute).
By the way, the publisher information tells the experienced reader a lot about the trustworthyness of a publication (and thus, whether it is worth the effort to get access to it).