Grammar Information

Please before you give me documents to read, have someone else (with good English grammar skills) read and edit the document for grammar, spelling, proper tense usage, mapping of verbs to plurals, etc. I am happy to edit for content and structure, but I should not be making grammatical edits that a Master's student should not be making. Documents with substantial spelling and grammatical errors will be returned without comment.

Material should be written in the passive (not active) voice. Specifically, as much as possible should be in third person (one should) as opposed to first (I, we) or second (you). It takes a little manipulating, but anything you say in first or second person can be manipulated to be in the passive voice. (For example: It takes a little manipulating, but anything one says in first or second person can be manipulated to be in the passive voice.)

Also, on this note, don't forget that while, in your proposal, discussion of the work may use future tense, in your actual document the work will be past - since when it is submitted, the work is done.

About capital letters: Specific items are capitalized, general collections are not capitalized. For example,
"The following chapter will..." and "In Chapter 2 related areas of research are addressed."
"As is seen in the appendices..." and "One can see in Appendix A that..."
"the Computer Science Department at California State University, Chico" and "in most computer science departments, one will find"

Keep the use of italics, bold, underline, etc. to a minimum.

About hyphens: Two words used as one adjective should be hyphenated. For example
an object-oriented program, or a user-interface design.
Otherwise both words are understood to modify the noun and that is not what is intended.
For example, it is not a user design and an interface design.
Now, if these two words are an adjective and the noun, then it is not hyphenated. For example, "The user interface was great." is fine

Citation Information

One needs to provide citations (pointers) from within the document to the references where they apply. This is not just for quotes of material but think of the references as places where the reader could find out more about what is being mentioned. So for example the first time one mentions object-oriented analysis and design they could mention say [1] citing the Larman book. When one talks about the importance of maintainability, adaptability, and portability [2] they could point to a software engineering text or even one of the Java books. Students generally put these in the related work and background sections but it is appropriate to include them at "general" locations as well.

Another common example is when in text someone says, "Research has shown", or "Many applications use.." - places like this should give references to this research or access to these "many applications".

The bibliography should illustrate the rich source of information one accessed. This should be largely comprised of refereed materials: books, journals, conference proceedings, etc. A majority of the materials used should be referred (as opposed to web pages ... anyone can say anything they want on a web page). It is allowable to have some web sources, but remember that these are not refereed and thus are not as reliable.

The department has chosen the required common reference and citation style guide of the IEEE Computer Society's Style Guide for Master's. See also this list of sources for how to reference information (including electronic (web) sources) if you cannot find what you are looking for in the IEEE web page.