[A4] Research Proposal Revisions

Improve Your Manuscript

Revisit your research proposal with the mindset of a programmer analyzing code. In this assignment, you (critically) refine and improve your research proposal by applying principles of “program analysis and synthesis”, with a focus on clarity, precision, and brevity.

• Fix any spelling or grammatical issues.
• Improve the organization of your text, e.g., make topic sentences clearly conclude a paragraph.
• Against Vagueness: Challenge yourself to identify any vague statements in your proposal. Rewrite your “statements” to be as specific and clear as possible, and avoid programming errors like use-without-definition.
• Against Verbosity: Apply the principle of minimization to your writing. Eliminate redundant phrases, and any statement that does not add value to your proposal.

You may ask a peer to proof-read your research proposal. After revision, your proposal should look like a serious research paper. Specifically, you should take good care of different type of readers:

• Junior-year undergraduates. They have some (but limited) background in programming, algorithms, and computer systems. You should try to convince them that you are trying to solve a really interesting problem with really exciting techniques.
• Graduates, but from other areas in computer science. They can have their independent judgment of the quality of your research work.
• Expert, but from other areas in computer science. They read a lot of papers. You should quickly impress them with your good work.
• Your domain experts, maybe the author of a paper you cited. They are likely the most weighted reviewers in the program committee to decide whether your paper should be thrown away. They will have a quick and precise judgment of your research contributions. So don't irritate them!

Try to make your article readable to all the above audiences. Don't worry about writing too much background-Your domain experts will skim your topic sentences and directly jump to your point. See the power of topic sentences!

Useful reference materials:

• Writing Tips and Style Guidelines (see the “general grammar” and “technical writing” parts)
• The Elements of Style and The Chicago Manual of Style (CMOS)
• The friendly web (e.g., stackexchange). Feel free to recommend anything to jyy!

Typeset with TeX

Use the following document configurations:

\documentclass[acmsmall,review,screen,anonymous]{acmart}
\acmConference[Introduction to SE Research]{The 2023 Introduction to Software Engineering Research at Nanjing University (ISER'23)}{2023}{Nanjing, China}
\setcopyright{none}

Reference format: \bibliographystyle{ACM-Reference-Format}.

Important note: you should put your name and affiliation (English) in the \author{} block, such that your research proposal still looks good when anonymous is removed. The instructors will keep a printed proceeding. The A2's rules still apply:

1. Write in English.
2. Not exceed six pages (single-column) for the main text (including figures, tables, and appendices). Additional pages containing only references are allowed.
3. The research proposal should be anonymous that the author's identity is not revealed. See the “double-anonymous review process” part of the FSE 2024 submission guideline for more details.

Compilation Requirements

• Submit a zip-format archive of source code. The document root should be named main.tex (any directory will be okay).
• Build command: latexmk -pdf main.tex.

Typeset a Beautiful Paper

Try your test to create a beautiful paper. Please refer to the texdoc of acmart (texdoc acmart in command line). Here is a link to common LaTeX issues. You may also find beautiful papers in POPL/PLDI/OOPSLA/ECOOP. Another source to learn typesetting is from preprint sources on arXiv.