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When it comes to programming assignments, most upper-division students know how to prepare their code and what to turn in. You may be less familiar with what we expect when you prepare and submit writing assignments. Please read this page carefully, and read it over again each time you start a new assignment. Your grade will suffer if you don't follow these instructions.

Submission mechanics

Unless we say otherwise, you will submit final versions to Checkmate (our on-line submission system) in Microsoft Word (.doc) or PDF format. (Presentation slides should be submitted in either Microsoft PowerPoint (.ppt) or PDF format.) For more information about using Checkmate, please follow this link.

We will generally also require you to resubmit paper copies of your drafts, particularly the versions that are edited by your classmates.

Format

On a separate cover sheet, or at the top of the first page, put your name, "ICS 139W (Thornton)," and the assignment (e.g. "Introduction and Tutorial, draft"). Place page numbers at the bottom of each page.

Intermediate versions

Writing is an iterative process. The first words you put on paper won't be perfect, any more than the first code you type when you start writing a program. Revision — debugging — is the norm. For most assignments, you will turn in more than one version. We may refer to these intermediate versions as drafts, but don't think of them as incomplete, haphazard "rough drafts" or first attempts. Every one of your drafts should be as good as you can make it — thoughtful, polished work with no spelling or sentence-level errors. We typically edit one draft in class. Don't waste your group editing time on proofreading; it's your job to do that in advance so your editor can address the content.

Plagiarism — don't do it!

Plagiarism means presenting somebody else's work as if it's your own. You may use whatever outside sources (books, friends, interviews, periodicals) are appropriate for an assignment, so long as you cite them. Any time you use two or more words in a row that you didn't think up and write yourself, you must put the words in quotation marks and indicate where they came from. (There could be situations where this two-word rule isn't appropriate. If you think you have one, check with us.) Even if you paraphrase (state in your own words) someone else's work or ideas, you should cite the source (e.g. "Dijkstra says that unrestricted branching is dangerous."). Plagiarism is academically dishonest, and we expect that nobody in the class will engage in it.

That should be enough said, but unfortunately there have been instances of plagiarism in these courses in the past. We will check for it both manually and by using software that compares students' work with work from other sources, including the Internet and work submitted in previous quarters. ICS school policy is that plagiarists fail the course and have their offense recorded by Undergraduate Affairs. Academic honesty violations can affect a student's graduation, financial aid, and eligibility for honors. The school deals with plagiarism cases every quarter, even though most people don't hear about them. No matter how pressured you feel, don't plagiarize; it's not worth it!

Grammatical mechanics

We expect you, as upper-division students who have satisfied the lower-division writing requirement, to have a good command of the mechanical principles of English syntax, spelling, and punctuation. ICS 139W focuses on content, organization, audience, and style. We expect that you will take the time to make your assignments nearly flawless from a mechanical standpoint. We will not mark every mechanical error on your papers, but they will lower your grade, and we will ask you to resubmit assignments with significant mechanical problems. Use Writing from A to Z as a reference on these issues. Students who wish to hone these mechanical skills further should contact the Learning and Academic Resource Center on campus (www.larc.uci.edu).

Any upper-division computer science student should be aware that software-based grammar checkers are horribly inaccurate and entirely untrustworthy. Problems may still exist in a document that the grammar checker doesn't complain about, and often grammar checkers complain about passages that are perfectly fine. It is particularly dangerous to use a grammar checker the way a first-year programming student uses a compiler, just tweaking the prose until all the green squiggles go away. Grammar checkers are no substitute for knowing what you're doing; if it were possible to describe natural language completely and accurately in software, we'd all be able to converse with our computers just as they do in the movies.

Spelling and spelling checkers

Never rely solely on an automatic spelling checker; they help, but they do not substitute for human intelligence in proofreading. Spelling checkers locate some typographical errors, but they cannot identify such commonly occurring errors as incorrectly used words ("of" for "or," "it's" for "its," "there" for "their" or "they're") or inadvertent substitution of one valid word for another (such as "consistency" for "consistently"). Always leave yourself the time for a calm, undistracted review of your document for these mechanical errors, independent of your revisions for content and style.

Counting words and pages

So that we can speak consistently of the length of assignments, "one page" will refer to one standard, double-spaced typewritten page with 1.25-inch margins. At roughly 30 lines of text per page and roughly 10 words per line, one page by this measure contains roughly 300 words. Typeset material from books and magazines is typically denser. You should use this as a general guideline, and not waste time counting individual words by hand. Most word processors have automatic word counters, however, which you may use if you wish.

Typography

Your papers must be typewritten or word-processed. Except for final versions, everything you turn in should be double-spaced. Be sure to read this document and apply the typographic principles described there to your papers. If you use a very old printer, please make sure the print quality is still clean and legible.

Binding

Do not use any kind of report cover when you submit drafts. A simple staple in the upper left-hand corner is perfectly fine.