Using and Writing using IEEE Journal/Conference Format

iEEE format is the one format that every ECE student should learn, as you will need it all your career. IEEE and its related format, ACM, is the format used by all technical publications, and it is set up to have a certain professional product. It is a format that one can find the rules and templates easily on a simple search, and many questions can be simply answered by a simple web search with many people contributing solutions to even the most strange questions. Therefore, it is useful for students to start with this format and approach as early in their career as possible.

One can compile many aspects that students, both early undergraduate students, as well as students finishing up their Ph.D. thesis might not quite understand, and I wanted to include these aspects.

• Figures must have captions. Try to avoid any unnecessary backgrounds on the figures (unnecessary dots, etc). Figure Captions can be one line, and they can be longer. If there is something specific about a particular figure, it often makes sense to put it directly in the caption. If there are things that make sense to have with the figure, like settings or parameters, etc, it often makes sense to put the information in the caption where it will be read with the figure.
• Keep the figures around the text. Should not be a body of figures towards the end; let the figures help your explanation.
• Do not have hand-written items scanned into the project writeup. Everything should be good computer generated information, whether a figure or in the text.
• Do not make the data figures too small. If your data figures are too small, you are including something else that is not necessary, likely.
• Use more descriptive section headings. You do not need to precisely have the headers, Introduction, Methods, etc. These are suggestions, For a report of a lab or project, having a few sentances that overview the topic initially is valuable, as well as having discussion at the end summarizing (or concluding) the topic. The first section heading should not be "introduction", but should be "introduction to something" and might not need the word introduction. If you can not come up with anything else for your introduction paragraph, don't use the header at all, as it is redundant to use the title "Introduction". Similar comment for "Methods", "Results". etc. There is no need to separate methods and results; often they are fused as one uses the results to explain the approach and procedure. Integrating results and methods is expected, so there is no need to separate those two parts.
• A section should have text, not just figures, and there should be text right before a header. Use a header when it is helpful for your discussion. If you are going to have a subheading (e.g. IIIA) there must be at least two (e.g. IIIA and IIIB) as well as there must always be text before the first subsection heading.
• Do not use the subheadings as a way to try to just linearly answer questions, and then have additional items (e.g. a) ... d) ) to just try to anwer questions. I want you to synthesize things together, and not doing so will have points taken off.
• Be careful of the fonts you are using. Staying with Times New Roman tends to be the best approach, and the easiest to match at high quality with figures.
• For MATLAB figures, don't have the images for the MATLAB figures, etc, have a block background. The desired case is a white background with the resulting graph and no grey box around the figure. The best approach for exporting figures out of MATLAB is doing a "print -d(figure type) (Filename)" and then bringing it into the document (e.g. print -depsc coolfigure.eps ). The grey box only takes up area.
• Don't include code or pseudo-code into the text unless it is explicitly needed or explicitly asked to be given. Too much code actually takes away from the overall presentation. In general, you want to not put any code unless it is absolutely necessary.