be a total nerd about the correct kind of hyphen here

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Mirek Kratochvil 2023-05-14 16:52:27 +02:00 committed by Oleg Petruny
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@ -54,7 +54,7 @@ As an usual example, \xxx{\textit{`The sentence, which I wrote, seemed ugly.'}}
\paragraph{Nouns}
Every noun needs a determiner (`a', `the', `my', `some', \dots); the exceptions to this rule, such as non-adjectivized names and indeterminate plural, are relatively scarce. Without a determiner, a noun can be easily mistaken for something completely different, such as an adjective or a verb.
Name all things with appropriate nouns to help both the reader and yourself, and do not hesitate to invent good names and labels for anything that you will refer to more than once. Proper naming will save you a lot of writing effort because you will not have to repeat descriptions such as \xxx{\textit{`the third output of the second benchmarked method of the improved set,'}} instead you may introduce a labeling that will allow you to say just something like \textit{`output M2\textsuperscript{+}-3'}. At the same time, this will reduce the risk that the reader will confuse the object with another one --- for illustration, the long version of the previous example might very easily confuse with the second output of the third method. The same also applies to methods descriptions, algorithms, programs, testing datasets, theorems, use-cases, challenges and other things. As an example, \xxx{\textit{`the algorithm that organizes the potatoes into appropriate buckets'}} shortens nicely as \textit{`the potato bucketer'} and may be labeled as a procedure \textsc{BucketPotatoes()}, and \xxx{\textit{`the issue where the robot crashes into a wall and takes significant time to return to the previous task'}} may be called just \textit{`the crash-recovery lag'}.
Name all things with appropriate nouns to help both the reader and yourself, and do not hesitate to invent good names and labels for anything that you will refer to more than once. Proper naming will save you a lot of writing effort because you will not have to repeat descriptions such as \xxx{\textit{`the third output of the second benchmarked method of the improved set,'}} instead you may introduce a labeling that will allow you to say just something like \textit{`output M2\textsuperscript{+}-3'}. At the same time, this will reduce the risk that the reader will confuse the object with another one --- for illustration, the long version of the previous example might very easily confuse with the second output of the third method. The same also applies to methods descriptions, algorithms, programs, testing datasets, theorems, use-cases, challenges and other things. As an example, \xxx{\textit{`the algorithm that organizes the potatoes into appropriate buckets'}} shortens nicely as \textit{`the potato bucketer'} and may be labeled as a procedure \textsc{BucketPotatoes()}, and \xxx{\textit{`the issue where the robot crashes into a wall and takes significant time to return to the previous task'}} may be called just \textit{`the crash--recovery lag'}.
\paragraph{Verbs}
Although English can express a whopping 65 base verb tenses and their variants, scientific literature often suppresses this complexity and uses only several basic tenses where the meaning is clearly defined. Typically, you state facts in present simple (\textit{`Theorem 1 proves that Gadget B works as intended.'}), talk about previous work and experiments done in past simple (\textit{`We constructed Gadget B from Gizmo C, which was previously prepared by Tinkerer et al.'}), and identify achieved results in present perfect (\textit{`We have constructed Technology T.'}). Avoid using future tense, except for sections that explicitly describe future work --- as a typical mistake, if you state that the thesis \emph{will} describe something in later chapters, you imply that the description is not present there yet.