VV070/05
Adapted from “Writing Guidelines for Engineering and Science Students.” Leonhart Center, Penn State. .
Fowler, Henrey Ramsey; Aaron, Jane E., and Janice Okoomian. The Little, Brown Handbook. 10th ed. New York: Longman. 2007.
Justin Zobel. Writing for Computer Science: The Art of Effective Communication. Singapore: Springer, 2000.
Style and Clarity
Look at the sentences below and try to rewrite them according to the suggestions:
Join
Modules are loaded on request by an application. Thus, the performance of the application is dependent on modules
which are currently used by the application.
Use parallelism
The logging subsystem provides a rich set of filter rules (expressions), detailed description of all filters and rules can
be found in the Logging documentation
Identify the Czenglish mistake
The ECA formalism provides a clear and easy-to-understand way how the bytecode injection should be performed
without ambiguity.
Link sentences
The class name describes a class with or without the package specification. The method name can be defined either
as a plain name or as a name with arguments and return type. The constructor method is defined by the special
string in the method name.
Paragraphs plus reporting verb
The authors of Qubes OS believe [3] there is a considerably better isolation between virtual machines than between
standard processes in a monolithic kernels of mainstream desktop operating systems.
They claim this is because the interface between virtual machine and hypervisor can be substantially simpler than in
case of a traditional operating system. Moreover, the hypervisor itself can be
VV070/05
Adapted from “Writing Guidelines for Engineering and Science Students.” Leonhart Center, Penn State. .
Fowler, Henrey Ramsey; Aaron, Jane E., and Janice Okoomian. The Little, Brown Handbook. 10th ed. New York: Longman. 2007.
Justin Zobel. Writing for Computer Science: The Art of Effective Communication. Singapore: Springer, 2000.
abundantly simpler as it does not provide many services. Modern computers also provide hardware virtualization
support (VT-x, VT-d or Intel TXT), which allows …
Plagiarism?
student text:
The first type is System Network domain, storage domain and a Special privileged domain are all examples of System
VM. These domains provide system-wide services and are common to all installations of Qubes OS. The network
domain for example isolates the world-facing networking code into an unprivileged virtual machine, which protects
the system when it is used in a hostile network environment (hotel, airport). [3, p. 7] The system would not be
compromised even if a vulnerable part of the network domain is exploited. Only possible consequence is a denial-ofservice
(DoS) attack as the connection would be terminated. The other VMs of the users would remain intact. [3,
Ibid.]
the actual paper:
“Additionally there are some default system VMs that are provided automatically. One example is the Network VM,
which isolates all the world-facing networking code into an unprivileged VM. This protects the system when using
the network in a potentially hostile environment, such as a hotel or an airport. Even if an attacker exploits a potential
bug, e.g. in the WiFi driver, this does not allow to compromise the system. At worst, the user would simply lose
network connection, but the users VMs and data should be safe.”
I. Make it easy for the reader to understand what you are saying
II. Use the correct words and make every word count
Find the balance
a) Long and complex sentence -> avoid by separating into two sentences
eHealth cloud, while at the beginning of its initial run, has a very promising future, as such technology is poised to be
supported by modern solutions which are able to react ahead of technological curve, thus significantly prolonging
the possible use of the technology.
VV070/05
Adapted from “Writing Guidelines for Engineering and Science Students.” Leonhart Center, Penn State. .
Fowler, Henrey Ramsey; Aaron, Jane E., and Janice Okoomian. The Little, Brown Handbook. 10th ed. New York: Longman. 2007.
Justin Zobel. Writing for Computer Science: The Art of Effective Communication. Singapore: Springer, 2000.
b) Obfuscation – making statements difficult to understand by using ambiguous or convoluted terms -> avoid
by being more direct
Experiments, with the improved version of algorithm as we have described, are the step that confirms our
speculation that performance would improve. The previous version of the algorithm is rather slow on our test data
and improvements lead to better performance.
c) Not direct enough -> avoid by being more direct
PerfCake has a component architecture. Components are specified through well-defined interfaces; thus, it might be
easy to provide a new component implementation by a third party. As it will be described in the next chapter, the
additional implementation may be simply loaded into the PerfCake and that perhaps is the one of the reasons why
PerfCake is easily extensible.
d) Too general or informal -> avoid by knowing your audience
Let us imagine a situation when a company is young and small and the team consists of only few people. The
communication between colleagues is not that difficult and so there is probably no effort to establish rules for using
the same techniques, technologies and languages for storing data. But as the company comes to some cusses and
starts to make big profits, it starts to grow and make new divisions across a country or even across the world.
e) Repetition – not just words/phrases, but also sentence structure -> avoid by using more complex sentence
structures
The system of rational numbers is incomplete. This was discovered 2000 years ago by the Greeks. The problem arises
with squares whose sides are of unit length. The length of the diagonals of these squares is irrational. This discovery
was a serious blow to the Greek mathematicians.
f) Too indirect – verbs such as “perform” or “utilize” -> avoid by using active voice
Tree structures can be utilized for dynamic storage of terms.
Local packet transmission was performed to test error rates.
VV070/05
Adapted from “Writing Guidelines for Engineering and Science Students.” Leonhart Center, Penn State. .
Fowler, Henrey Ramsey; Aaron, Jane E., and Janice Okoomian. The Little, Brown Handbook. 10th ed. New York: Longman. 2007.
Justin Zobel. Writing for Computer Science: The Art of Effective Communication. Singapore: Springer, 2000.
Grammar and Syntax
1. Find four mistakes among the underlined words/phrases.
A greenhouse is a glass building used to grow plants. A greenhouse has transparent glass that allows the sunlight to
pass through, but does not allow the heat inside to escape. The same affect occurs on the earth. The suns radiation
passes through the atmosphere to heat the earth's surface. When heated, the earth's surface produces infrared
radiation, which has a longer wavelength than that of sunlight. This infrared radiation rises into the atmosphere
where gases, such as carbon dioxide, prevents the infrared radiation from escaping into space. The concentrations of
these gases which are called greenhouse gases, control how much infrared radiation escapes. The retained radiation
heats the earth's atmosphere, thus keeping the planet warm.
2. For each excerpt, identify the source of the ambiguity: (1) improper syntax (word order), (2) missing
comma, (3) unclear pronoun reference, or (4) grouping of conflicting words.
- The Lunar Module was only designed to hold two astronauts and to have a life time of forty-five hours.
- The beams are positioned with respect to the chopper blade so that while one beam passes the output of
the opposite beam is completely blocked.
- The Hindenburg was filled with hydrogen because it is lighter than air...The report claimed that a hull wire
could have ruptured a gas cell if it fractured.
- Avoiding complicated multi-ordered calculations, the equations come from fundamental definitions of mass
flow, work, and efficiency.
- To provide spill protection, all tanks were equipped with basins and automatic shutoff devices or overfill
alarms or ball float valves.
- Being the first step in introducing CFD, Jones had to set up conservative assumptions.
- As with any system errors occur in localization.
- Having a model would help designers predict the effects of engine operation over all speeds.
- On this physical server was created a standalone host for OpenStack with 6 vCPUs, 16 GB RAM, 60 GB HDD
and Centos 7 Operating System.
SEMICOLON
Main clause + main clause (no coordinating conjunction)
The side effects are not minor; some leave the patient quite ill.
The semicolon separates equal sentence elements (often working around expectations).
VV070/05
Adapted from “Writing Guidelines for Engineering and Science Students.” Leonhart Center, Penn State. .
Fowler, Henrey Ramsey; Aaron, Jane E., and Janice Okoomian. The Little, Brown Handbook. 10th ed. New York: Longman. 2007.
Justin Zobel. Writing for Computer Science: The Art of Effective Communication. Singapore: Springer, 2000.
The airline campaign had highlighted only half the story; the other half was buried in the copy.
The campaign should not have stressed the pilots’ insecurity; instead, the campaign should have stressed the
improved performance resulting from that insecurity.
We often use semicolons between main clauses related by however, for example, etc.
3. Rewrite the sentences so that they include a semicolon and the expression in parenthesis.
1) Most music computers are too expensive for the average consumer. Digital keyboard instruments can be
inexpensive. They are widely available. (however)
2) Inside the keyboard is a small computer. The computer controls a sound synthesizer. The instrument can
both process and produce music. (consequently)
3) The person playing the keyboard presses keys or manipulates other controls. The computer and synthesizer
convert these signals. The signals are converted into vibrations and sounds. (immediately)
4) The inexpensive keyboards can perform only a few functions. To the novice computer musician, the range is
exciting. The range includes drum rhythms and simulated instruments. (still)
5) Would-be musicians can orchestrate whole songs. They start from just the melody lines. They need never
again play “Chopsticks.” (thus)
CZENGLISH
Look at some of the sentences and try to identify the problems common to Czech learners of English. (For more see
Don Sparling: English or Czenglish)
A) The town has three theatres and two concert halls. Besides there are more than twenty cinemas. (34)
B) This invention enabled to do twice as much work a day. (74)
C) I think he won’t come./* I want him not to go there./* John seems not to be very bright./ *
D) Everybody doesn’t agree with me./* Some teachers can’t understand that everyone isn’t interested in their
subjects. (154)