Adapted by contributing editor, Prof. Richard Levine, from the style sheet used for courses EETS8302 Digital Telephony and EETS8304 Digital Switching, in the Graduate Telecommunications Program of the Electrical Engineering Department, Southern Methodist University, and corresponding courses NTU TC716-N and TC715-N in the National Technical University.

This document gives technical writing style information and the professor's preferences. Some writers have differing styles as well. The objective of using a consistent style is clarity instead of ambiguity.

Style and Style Sheets: There are a number of good guidebooks on the style of academic or scholarly papers. You may use any one of them as a guide. They sometimes give different suggestions about minor matters of form, such as identifying sections with letters or numbers, or placing footnotes on the same page where they are cited versus gathering all of them at the end of the paper. In these matters where equally valid alternatives exist, you may use either method.

Some of the more widely used style manuals include the following items you can find on the Internet:

At http://juno.concordia.ca/services/citations.html you can read a summary of the APA, MLA, Turabian, Columbia University and other widely used style guides. This site also has a section on how to cite from the Internet.

The American Institute of Physics Guide for Metric Practice, can be found at http://www.aip.org/ptbg/search.jsp On the left side of this web page is a list of documents. Click on Guide for Metric Practice to download a short PDF...