Elements of a Good Assignment Submission

As professor Fischmeister has mentioned to me, the submission format of the first
assignment is not standardized. Some students have even forgotten to put down their
names and student numbers, leading to difficulties in assignment marking and grade
recording.

As a result, this handout is intended to remind you certain features that you should
make sure to include before your submission. These guidelines are applicable to both
hardcopy and softcopy submission.

1) Name, Student Number, Assignment Number, and Title Page:

A complete title page is included at the end of this document. You can simply
replace the student information with your own, and change the layout according
to your personal preference.

You can even choose to not attach a title page to your hardcopy submission (as
an effort to give Mother Earth a much needed relief). However, the key thing is
to always include your name and student number, and to clearly identify the
assignment number in your submission copy.

Starting assignment 3, submissions without the owner’s information will require

resubmission, and may suffer late-submission penalties if your resubmission
arrives after the deadline.

2) Spell Check and Proofreading:

Statistics shows that the task of proofreading takes up on average one-third of the
time in the composition of scientific articles and journals, since the
professionalism is highly valued in all the scientific and engineering society, as
well as in all other fields of professions. As you have reached the final stage of
becoming an engineer, it should be a part of your Engineering Pride that you can
submit quality works despite the size and the nature of the work you are engaged
in (Quoted from my undergrad engineering communication instructor).

Thus, it is highly recommended that you complete at least one thorough spell
check and proofreading in order to get rid of most of the “Syntax and Semantic
Errors” in your write-up. You can also form a proofreading group (but not a
 “copying” group ;p) so that you can get valuable peer-reviews. All these would
really help polish up your work, especially for formal reports and professional
publications. Please keep in mind that, if a formal report is required for the final
project (hopefully not =) ), your submission must be in decent format and quality
in order to avoid unwanted mark deductions.

3) Citation Format
There are tons of different citation formats developed by different academic
societies, and of course all of them are acceptable formats (except the ones you
come up with on your own). However, for this course, you will be asked to use
the standard citation format used in IEEE journals and articles, as you will see,
and possibly use, this format for the rest of your engineering career. Here is the
IEEE citation format:

[Author(s)], “[Name of the Article / Journal / etc.],” [Name of the Book /

Magazine (Italic)], [Page Number (if applicable)], [Publish Date].

Example:
H. Inoue, S. Fukutake, and H. Ohata, “Liquid crystal polymer film heat resistance and
high dimensional stability,” Proc. Pan Pacific Microelect. Symp., pp. 273-278, 2001.

When citing web sources:

[Author(s)], “[Name of the Article / Journal / etc.],” [Name of the Website

(Italic)], <[Website URL]>, [Publish Date].

Example:
Joseph R. Pascoe, Dave Seymore, “Liquid Crystal Polymer Properties,” Liquid Crystal
Polymer, <http://www.eng.buffalo.edu/~pascoe/lcp/>, 2005

In addition, you should also number all the items in your reference list, and place
the corresponding reference number besides the contents and figures that you
have pulled off from the reference documents. If your entire work is survey-
based (ex. the report intended to present a collection of works done by other
people), please identify all the paragraphs or sections with their corresponding
references. This is a very crucial step in your report writing, as it may get you
into lawsuit problems when you fail to properly cite other people’s work in your
publications, especially when a significant amount of business profit is involved.
ECE 671 Microwave and RF Engineering

Assignment 3

Submission Date: February 21, 2008

Keith Raiter

20117483