Tuesday, January 22, 2008

BTR820 Lecture 4

Grammar: Ideally you can read only the headings and get the gist of the whitepaper. I does hate on grammer!

More review

Passive Voice
Sounds pompous, hides the subject.

In English, we put our most important words at the front of the sentance, passive voice mixes up normal english "I need to go to the bathroom" vs "The bathroom needs to be gone to by me."

Passive Voice Rules
passive voice is very formal (used by scientific papers)
use we or our which is semi-formal and good for most purposes
sometimes use I which is informal and is sometimes suitable

Wretched
  • Got
  • Affect
  • Utilize
  • Accept
  • Then / Than
  • Supposed to
  • Used to
"The effect, an affect."

Jargon
define jargon once per chapter
Do so the first time you use the acronym
"Voice Over internet Protocol(VoIP) is a radical ..."
"Digital Rights Management (DRM) is ..."
avoid defining well known acroynms (IBM)

avoid computerese
nouns used as verbs (trash the files, boot the computer, firewalling would help)
uncommon words
telephony, connectivity
anything like lol, :), ROFL, u, i, etc.

If it can be said in smaller shorter words, do it. Brevity is the soul of wit.

Academic dishonesty
Very, very bad.

Kinds
copying answers
lying about the work you did
plagerising
Representing someone else's words/ideas as your own
  • writing
  • words
  • ideas
  • research
you do not need to cite common knowledge

types of plagiarism
- word for word
- summary
- citation

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