Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
publishers often have specific rules on such aspects of formatting). Beware of having
too few headings, though, because it is difficult to maintain the logical flow of a
section over more than a few pages.
The Opening Paragraphs
The opening paragraphs can set the reader's attitude to the whole paper or thesis, so
begin well. All of a document should be created and edited with care, but take the
most care with the opening, to create the best possible first impression. The abstract
should be written especially well, without an unnecessary word, and the opening
sentence should be direct and straightforward.
Trees, especially binary trees, are often applied—indeed indiscriminately
applied—to management of dictionaries.
Dictionaries are often managed by a data structure such as a tree. How-
ever, trees are not necessarily the best choice for this application.
The following, which was the first sentence of a paper, is an example of how to begin
badly.
This paper does not describe a general algorithm for transactions.
Only later does the reader discover than the paper describes an algorithm for a special
case.
General-purpose transaction algorithms guarantee freedom from deadlock,
but can be inefficient. In this paper, we describe a new transaction algorithm
that is particularly efficient for a special case, the class of linear queries.
The first paragraphs must be intelligible to any likely reader; save technicalities for
later on, so that readers who don't understand the details of your paper are still able
to appreciate your results and the importance of your work. That is, describe what
you have done without the details of how it was done.
Starting an abstract or introduction with “This paper concerns” or “In this paper”
often means that results are going to be stated out of context.
In this paper we describe a new programming language with matrix manipu-
lation operators.
Most numerical computation is dedicated to manipulation of matrices, but
matrix operations are difficult to implement efficiently in current high-level
programming languages. In this paper we describe a new programming lan-
guage with matrix manipulation operators.
The second version describes the context of the paper's contribution.
Beginning a paper by stating that a topic is popular or that a problem is important
is flat and uninspiring.
