Thesis/report/paper writing guidelines

First of all, your thesis or report or paper has to be readable. For this you have to spend enough time writing it meticulously, thinking both about “low level details” such as punctuation and capitalization, and “high level details” such as organization, flow, what figures to draw etc. Below is a set of (by no means exhaustive) guidelines. These may seem like small things, but if you don't spend your time writing your thesis or paper carefully, there is no reason why anyone else will spend their time reading it.

• No scanned in figures: You should draw all the figures that you need. This includes block diagrams of basic blocks, say a delta-sigma modulator, or an opamp amplifier which is commonly known and can be found elsewhere.
• The only possible reason to scan in a figure from elsewhere is to report someone else's significant result that can't be shown in any other way. e.g. someone's survey of all A/D converters, or frequency usage maps supplied by some standards body. In these cases, the source of the figure must be cited right below the figure, whether it is in a thesis or a presentation.
• Figure captions should be informative. One should get an idea of what the figure is about by looking at the figure and the caption. One shouldn't have to run to the text to do that.
• In XCircuit, use the largest(coarsest) grid size required to draw a certain figure. This will make it easy to keep things in line, symmetric etc. XCircuit, when started up, has a grid of 1/12 inch. This is sufficient for most purposes. When you need to draw something with a finer spacing, make the grid finer, draw it, and revert the grid to the default so that you don't move big things out of the coarse grid.
• Schematics of final designs should include device sizes.
• All junctions should have junction dots.

• There should be no space before a punctuation mark(fullstop, comma, semi-colon etc.) and one space afterwards. e.g. it should be Fig. 1, not Fig.1 or Fig .1.
• There should be half space between a number and a unit. There should be no linebreak between the two.
• All figure captions should end in a fullstop.

• Use standard IEEE style. e.g. it is “IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits”, not “Solid-State Circuits, IEEE Journal of”. It is customary to capitalize only the first word in the paper title in the bibliography. (In the title of the report, it is customary to capitalize all significant words). If you are referring to a book, capitalize all significant words in its title.
• References should be listed in the order in which they are first cited.

• Symbols should be consistently in math font or roman font throughout the text.
• Mathematical operators should be typeset in roman(i.e. \tan or \log, not tan or log in LaTeX).