This site is envisioned for my students who are learning how to write technical papers, but I welcome ideas and comments from anyone. I have accrued plenty of experience in editing papers (and in having my own papers edited), and realized that I tend to correct the same things over and over again with my students. Just as soon as one student gets used to my preferences, another comes along and the process restarts. This site is meant as a shortcut for students to see some of those preferences.
A few disclaimers:
- Some of these comments refer only to my preference in writing. I have tried to distinguish between things that are black-and-white right or wrong, and those that are how I prefer to write.
- I don’t claim to be perfect in my own writing. In fact, I’m barely “pretty good” about some of these things. A few I’m just learning about now.
- If you’re a stickler for grammar or a LaTeX whiz, and you see something that I’ve got wrong, by all means please contact me! I would love to have suggestions on how to improve this site.
Interested? (Or just reading because you have to?) See the sections on General Grammar, Technical Writing, LaTeX, and BibTeX.
Got another minute? In case you were (ironically) procrastinating from writing your papers by browsing this site, I would suggest the following outstanding article by Marco Luebbecke: https://mluebbecke.wordpress.com/2014/11/21/how-to-write-a-paper/
I was also pointed to a very nice style guide by Stephen Boyd, Ernest K. Ryu, and Neal Parikh, which is absolutely worth a read: http://stanford.edu/class/ee364b/latex_templates/template_notes.pdf