This page is meant for my students. It enumerates several points that I noticed I repeat for many of my students as I attempt to guide them down a path of research. These are mostly simple things, obvious in retrospect, but worth paying attention to.
PhD students are the primary targets of this advice, although much of it applies to MS students as well. I am of the view that research has not been conducted until it has been written up, hence the emphasis on papers in the first part of this document.
Over the last seven years, I've read perhaps four hundred papers in computer science and math. Thirty or so were well-written. These anomalies aside, extracting meaning from most of the papers was like sucking a camel through the eye of the proverbial needle upon which a thousand angels were dancing on my head, if I mix my metaphors right.
LaTeX is a wonderful system for text processing. However, in reviewing and reading many papers, I often see the same errors, over and over again. Especially for my students ... please don't ever give me your paper to read that has any of these errors.
Having just finished another pile of conference-paper reviews, it strikes me that the single most common stylistic problem with papers in our field is the abstract.
Disappointingly few Computer Science authors seem to understand the difference between an abstract and an introduction.