The Holger H. Hoos Style Guide

Spelling

• Use British spelling:
• Colour, neighbourhood, behaviour...
• Use the (-se) word forms not the (-ze) word forms. Don't forget all the varaiants: (-sed,-sation,-sations,-sing): Optimise, optimised, optimisation, optimisations, optimising.
• More examples: penalise, analyse, initialise, minimise, maximise, summarise, characterise, normalise, randomise, conceptualise, emphasise.
• Exceptions: size (sized, sizing...).

Capitalisation

• For (chapters,sections,figures,equations,tables,etc...) capitalise only when referencing a specific number. For example, in this chapter we ..., but in Chapter 6 we ...
• Capitalise proper names, such as Hamming distance or Boolean formula.
• When you capitalise a bullet, it should be a full sentence (but not strictly) and it must end with a period.

Sectional Comments

• At the very beginning of each section, there should be a few sentences that clearly state what we are about to investigate or show, so the reader has a good reason to continue reading.
• 'glue' between sections should be placed at the beginning of a section rather than at the end

References

• Avoid using references as nouns (as in "In Smith and Jones[6]"). Instead, either something like "Smith and Jones have shown ... [6]" or "As shown in the work by Smith and Jones[6] ...". The idea is that if you were to delete all references, everything should still be grammatically correct. This makes for a more elegant style and smoother reading.