Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
presentation have on readers, but the message is clear: if something looks terrible,
then the author doesn't care about the content; and if the author doesn't care, then
the reader certainly shouldn't.
There are several common forms of this ugliness. One is in illustrations and tables:
graphs that are badly designed or badly rendered, tables that are irregular or chaotic,
diagrams in which the parts are unrelated, and so on. Another form is in layout, with,
for example, absurdly sized headings or columns that overlap. A third form is the
presence of dramatic formatting glitches, such as font and font size changing from
paragraph to paragraph. Each of these conveys an impression of laziness.
Another kind of mistake conveys an impression of bad judgement: the decision
to use inappropriate styles of presentation. The
comic sans
font has been widely
mocked for its use in slides; it is even more mockable in a paper. Other examples
include use of colours instead of italics for emphasis, comical drawings,
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and peculiar
over-the-top jokes.
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A more subtle form of ugliness is when a paper is dense with errors. These may
be errors of fact, spelling errors, garbled citations, incomplete sentences, or any of
a range of such things. They show that the author is indifferent to the work, and the
reader will respond likewise.
Ignorance
All of the issues noted in this section make it difficult to see a paper as being of
value, but, as a way of persuading the reader that a paper is worthless, nothing is
more certain than a display of ignorance.
An example of this is when much of a paper is spent explaining an elementary
concept that will be familiar to any likely reader and maybe even to undergraduates.
While a few lines of reviewmay be appropriate (to ensure that terminology is correctly
understood, for example), why spend six pages of an algorithms paper explaining
the difference between random-access memory and hard disks? Moreover, when the
author gets the details wrong—and uses 1980s literature on memory technology in
a 2000s paper, to consider one particular paper—the main effect is to reveal that the
work is unreliable.
A similar example is when the author discusses at great length a statement that is
either blindingly obvious or, worse, clearly false. “Web pages from a single website
may bemore like each other than pages drawn fromdifferent locations”, besides being
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Particularly memorable (not in a good way) was a submission that included a photograph of
Britain's Queen Elizabeth II, on which the author had superimposed a cartoon of a smiling mouth
and a thumbs-up, to illustrate the Queen's happiness at the result of a successful Web search for
“corgi”. There was no mention of royalty or corgis in the text.
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Such as a paper in which the methods were named after kinds of duck, explanations made frequent
(laboured) reference to duck behaviour, there were jokes about ducks (for example: Why did the
duck cross the road? Because it wasn't chicken), the points in the graphs were duck shapes instead
of circles or crosses, and one of the authors was allegedly Bill Feathertail of Poll Tree College.
