Technical Writing Guidelines

1. Be sympathetic to your reader.
2. Keep it simple and direct-
   Use simple and direct language. Form sentences with single verbs. Break clausal and compound sentences into multiple sentences. Never start a sentence with ‘And’. Choose correct ‘prepositions’ in particular.
3. Keep in mind that “word saved is space earned”. Using sentences and words economically will lead to enough space for analysis, intuition, and insight.
4. Do not use non-specific words-
   Be specific. Do not use vague terms. For example, instead of using “There are issues in my framework”, describe what the exact issues are. While writing facts, figures and quantities, use bulleted or numbered lists. List of contributions should always be enumerated.
5. Be careful with punctuation-
   Use proper punctuation. A few points to remember are:
1. Don’t leave space before hyphens and commas, and leave one space after them.
2. Always leave one space before an open parenthesis. Do not leave any space before a close parenthesis.
6. Be careful with articles for nouns-
   In English, plural nouns usually do not have an article preceding them, whereas, singular nouns always have an article before them.
   Make sure to use proper articles (a, an, the). ‘The’ should be used for a previously mentioned noun.
7. Write abstract, conclusion, and captions of figures and tables properly-
   Reviewers never read a paper line-by-line. They usually first go through the abstract, then the conclusion, and the establishment of the claims made via figures and tables.
   The abstract and conclusion of a paper should be strong and to the point. The captions of tables and figures should be informative and up to 3-4 sentences long.
   Do not fuse motivations with abstract. Never leave out motivation.
8. References should be in a consistent format.

Additional rules to follow:

• Difference between camera-ready paper and submitted (to be reviewed) paper- Camera-ready papers have to stand the test of time. Camera-ready papers take into account the reviewers’ feedback on the submitted papers. Some tables and/or figures might have to be redone. Content that is common knowledge might have to be deleted.
• The motivation and conclusion of the research paper are usually written in simple language to make it more readable.
• Novelty is newness + value.