Check List before Handing in Your Paper

For English:

1. Check in WinEdit or other Latex input processor for those words underlined with red. Make sure there is no misspelling.

2. Avoid running sentences. In English, once the subject, verb, and object are complete, it should be a complete sentence, stopped by a period. This is not like Chinese.

3. One paragraph for a topic.

4. Use passive tense as few as possible.

5. When using an acronym, give its full name when it first appears (except in title), e.g., “Principal Component Analysis (PCA).”

6. Check the plurals and tense.

7. Make clear the usage of “the” and “a”. Some of them are subtle. But most of the cases, their usages are clear. In particular, use “an” before a word or a math entity whose pronunciation leads with a vowel, such as “L^1-norm” and $h\times h$. Check http://alt-usage-english.org/

8. If there are only two objects, A and B, write “A and B”. Do not write “A, B”.

9. If there are more than two objects, A, B, …, Y, and Z, normally you can write both “A, B, …, Y, and Z” and “A, B, …, Y and Z”. However, the former is recommended in http://alt-usage-english.org/. Anyway, this should be consistent throughout the paper.

10. Do not write “A, B, and C, etc.” Write “A, B, C, etc.” instead.

11. Do not write “isn’t”, “aren’t”, “don’t”, “doesn’t”, etc. Those are for spoken communication. Write “is not”, “are not”, “do not”, “does not”, etc., instead.

12. Do not write “can not”. Write “cannot” instead.

13. Notice the correct dots in “e.g.”, “etc.”, “et al.”, etc.

14. Put a comma before “respectively”.

15. Leave a space between texts and left parenthesis, left bracket, or citation. Also leave a space between comma or period and the successive texts.

16. Use “``” and “`” in the .tex file for the left quotation mark.

Check with http://alt-usage-english.org/ frequently if you are unsure.

For Math Expressions:

17. Use intuitive notations. A rule of thumb is that you use salient characters in their English name as their notations. This can greatly enhance memory association. However, the second rule is that you must use different notations for different objects. So you have to balance between these two rules. There are also other notation conventions which you should also follow, such as using i, j, k etc. for enumeration, using Greek letters for angles.All the notations should be explained when they first appear. If the paper uses a lot of notations, summarize and explain all the frequently used notations in a table.

18. For inner product, use “\langle” and “\rangle” instead of “<” and “>”. For norms, use “\|” instead of “||”.

19. Every standalone math expression should end with a punctuation, either comma or period, depending on whether it is at the end of a sentence.

20. If there are delimiters in a math expression, use “\left” and “\right” so that they can scale with the height of the math expression.

21. Align multi-line math arrays properly so that the whole expression looks good. Avoid stretching-out expressions.

For Figures and Tables:

22. For every figure or table, it must have a caption and be referred to in the body text. The detail of caption should be just enough so that a reader do not have to refer to the body text to comprehend it.

23. Label the axes of a figure. If they are not apparent, explain the axes in caption.

24. If you generate a figure by Matlab, use “print –dpsc XXXX.eps” to save the figure into EPS. This ensures high visual quality of the figure.

25. Do not merge multiple figures/images in a single image. Label each sub-figure/image with “(a)”, “(b)”, “(c)”, etc., for easy reference.

26. Try to avoid using color to refer to the objects in a figure. Use line style of shape instead. But sometimes this is hard to achieve.

27. Check whether the curves/texts in a figure can be differentiable after printing on paper.

28. If you refer to multiple figures or tables simultaneously, write “Figures A and B” or “Tables A and B”, rather than “Figure A and Figure B” or “Table A and Table B.”

For References:

29. The reference information should be complete.

30. Every reference must be cited in the body text. Naturally achieve this by using a .BIB file.

31. Make the style of references consistent. Achieve this by compiling your .BIB file in a consistent style. Some first letters of human names or technical acronyms, such as “PSNR” and “Laplacian”, should always be capitalized in whatever bibstyle. Achieve this by adding parenthesis to the capitalized letters in the .BIB file.

Miscellaneous:

32. Use \label{xxx} and \ref{xxx} to refer to a numbered object, such as section, equation, figure and table. Do not write their numbers directly in the .tex file.

33. Check your .log file to see whether there are undefined or multiple defined references.