Style Guides Research Articles

It’s Time to Stop Reinventing the Wheel; Let’s Connect Those Dots Instead

A constant question I see come up for anything related to scholarly publishing—or really anything related to life in general—is: “How do I get started?” And now that I have entered the “halftime” of my life, as my husband so lovingly calls it, I see the hardest part of really any project is just figuring out how to get going. (Side note: Jonathan Schultz, our beloved Editor-in-Chief, is nodding his head knowingly as he reads this wee-bit-late column that I promised him would be early this month. We are all guilty of not knowing where to start.) Publishing used to be so much simpler. I copyedited an article and saved it on a floppy disk. I marked up paper page proofs with my purple editing pen using old school copyediting marks. I had a pica ruler and a hardcover dictionary along with paper style guides. I even used to hand code articles with XML for overtime. I will always love those overtime opportunities both for the XML knowledge and the Christmas gifts they bought my kids. Articles were published and then largely forgotten as we moved on to the next ones. Glossy journals piled up in stacks and collected dust as the same cycle repeated itself again and again. Thank you for indulging my walk down memory lane, but I am here to tell you that the way we do things today is so much better. Looking back, I think of all of those amazing articles that readers missed out […]

“What's the Brief?”

“What's the Brief?”

Style Guides and the Garlic, Shallots, and Butter of Scientific Writing

Style Guides and the Garlic, Shallots, and Butter of Scientific Writing

Must Check! Instruction for Authors and Manuscript Style Guide

Must Check! Instruction for Authors and Manuscript Style Guide

Influence of diagram layout and scrolling on understandability of BPMN processes: an eye tracking experiment with BPMN diagrams

Business process modeling is an important activity for developing software systems—especially within digitization projects and when realizing digital business models. Specifying requirements and building executable workflows is often done by using BPMN 2.0 process models. Although there are several style guides available for BPMN, e.g., by Silver and Richard (BPMN method and style, vol 2, Cody-Cassidy Press, Aptos, 2009), there has not been much empirical research done into the consequences of the diagram layout. In particular, layouts that require scrolling have not been investigated yet. The aim of this research is to establish layout guidelines for business process modeling that help business process modelers to create more understandable business process diagrams. For establishing benefits and penalties of different layouts, a controlled eye tracking experiment was conducted, in which data of 21 professional software developers was used. Our results show that horizontal layouts are less demanding and that as many diagram elements as possible should be put on the initially visible screen area because such diagram elements are viewed more often and longer. Additionally, diagram elements related to the reader’s task are read more often than those not relevant to the task. BPMN modelers should favor a horizontal layout and use a more complex snake or multi-line layout whenever the diagrams are too large to fit on one page in order to support BPMN model comprehension.

The Translation Brief as a Tool of Communication among the Participants of the Translation Process

The present research focuses on theoretical and practical aspects of the translation brief viewed as a tool of communication among the participants of the translation process. A review of literature on the subject, which includes theoretical papers and normative documents regulating the sphere of translation and interpreting services, demonstrates a number of differences in understanding of the terms translation process and translation brief. In translation theory, translation process refers to either individual intellectual operations of a translator in making translation decisions or to stages of translation performance. The concept of the translation brief, developed within the functionalist theory of translation, is currently interpreted by functionalist scholars as a set of instructions which help translators to produce a target text in full compliance with clients’ needs and expectations. Therefore, a translation brief should provide a translator with the information about the target text addressees, the prospective time and place of text reception, the medium over which the text will be transmitted, and, sometimes, the intended purpose of the translation. In this country, the problem of the translation brief is mostly studied in the context of technical translation and is termed as the requirement description or technical specifications. According to normative documents regulating the sphere of translation services, clarification of the requirement description or technical specifications is seen as an integral component of organizing any translation services or translation projects. The practical aspect of this research is connected with the study of the status and the content of the translation brief as it now stands and functions in the translation industry. The analysis of information presented on websites of large translation agencies about the organization of the translation process as well as of available samples of technical specifications has shown that the content of a translator’s instructions may include very diverse material, from extended sections on translation norms taken from translation theory to references to the rules of translation specified in corresponding national quality standards. The results of our case study show that the basic components of technical specifications typically include the source text, terms of payment, and the deadline, while a translator’s instructions are normally associated with specific style guides provided by the client.

Is core vocabulary a friend or foe of academic writing? Single-word vs multi-word uses of thing

Core vocabulary items (e.g. thing, way) are often viewed as the enemy of effective academic writing, and style guides and textbooks often advise against using them. However, their bad reputation seems to stem from a single-word perspective that ignores the rich phraseological units that such items tend to figure in. In this study, we focus on the core vocabulary lemma thing to investigate the extent to which a phraseological approach can redeem its reputation. We look at learner essays from ten different first-language backgrounds from the International Corpus of Learner English and compare these to reference corpora from the endpoints of the informal-formal continuum: the Spoken BNC2014 and the Corpus of Academic Journal Articles. The results show that a phraseological approach indeed provides a more nuanced view of the core lemma thing: it is used in a wide variety of multi-word units, many of which common in academic writing. Although some signs of novice production are evident in the learners’ writing, their use is closest to that of the expert academic writers. The paper concludes with a discussion of the role of phraseology in vocabulary lists used in teaching and assessment.

A corpus-aided study of stance adverbs in judicial opinions and the implications for English for Legal Purposes instruction

This article reports a corpus-aided analysis of stance adverbs within published judicial opinions from the 12 geographically-apportioned districts of the United States (US) Federal Courts of Appeals. The study first analyzes stance adverbs previously investigated in US Supreme Court decisions in order to more comprehensively explore these interactional features across multiple levels of the judicial system. Following this initial analysis, the study then examines variation in the use of stance adverbs between majority and dissenting opinions in Courts of Appeals opinions to identify salient similarities and differences in frequency and function in the two opinion types. The initial analysis reveals divergence in stance adverb use between the Courts of Appeals and the Supreme Court and between legal writing and other registers, indicating the prevalence and importance of stance adverbs within legal writing. Additionally, the study notes variation in stance adverbs between majority and dissenting opinions. This article details the variation of stance adverbs across these aforementioned contexts, discusses how the variation noted in the corpus analysis at times conflicts with the advice of legal writing style guides, and offers pedagogical implications of these findings for English for Legal Purposes instruction.

A Beginner's Guide to Conducting Reproducible Research

A Beginner's Guide to Conducting Reproducible Research

Analyzing the Impact of Roadmap and Vehicle Features on Electric Vehicles Energy Consumption

Electric Vehicles (EVs) market penetration rate is continuously increasing due to several aspects such as pollution reduction initiatives, government incentives, cost reduction, and fuel cost increase, among others. In the vehicular field, researchers frequently use simulators to validate their proposals before implementing them in real world, while reducing costs and time. In this work, we use our ns-3 network simulator enhanced version to demonstrate the influence of the map layout and the vehicle features on the EVs consumption. In particular, we analyze the estimated consumption of EVs simulating two different scenarios: (i) a segment of the E313 highway, located in the north of Antwerp, Belgium and (ii) the downtown of the city of Antwerp with real vehicle models. According to the results obtained, we demonstrate that the mass of the vehicle is a key factor for energy consumption in urban scenarios, while in contrast, the Air Drag Coefficient ( ${\text C}_{d}$ ) and the Front Surface Area (FSA) play a critical role in highway environments. The most popular and powerful simulations tools do no present combined features for mobility, realistic map-layouts and electric vehicles consumption. As ns-3 is one of the most used open source based simulators in research, we have enhanced it with a realistic energy consumption feature for electric vehicles, while maintaining its original design and structure, as well as its coding style guides. Our approach allows researchers to perform comprehensive studies including EVs mobility, energy consumption, and communications, while adding a negligible overhead.

CONTINUING PHANTOM INFLUX OF ENGLISH LEXIS VIA LOCALIZATION: AN ANALYSIS OF ENGLISH COMPUTER TERMINOLOGY LOCALIZED IN SERBIAN

The paper analyzes the English computer terminology localized into Serbian between 2010 to 2020 both from the purely lexical stand-point (type and status of borrowings, as per Prćić (2005)), and from the viewpoint of pragmatic borrowings (Andersen 2014), but in a narrower set of pragmatic borrowings limited to written modes of communication: direct and indirect borrowing of interjections, discourse markers, expletives, vocatives, and paralinguistic phenomena. The chosen period saw a rapid expansion of instant communication applications with rich sets of emoticons, proliferation of cloud services and replace- ment of traditional software with software as a service. The research aims to shed light on how much the new lexis from computer-mediated forms of communication, as well as pragmatic notions stemming from the emerging trend of IT companies crafting their content to adhere to strict stylistic and audience accommodation guidelines, have been taken over into Serbian. Preliminary findings indicate that there is a huge number of both lexical and pragmatic borrowings, including interjections and paralinguistic phenomena such as names of emoticons and short codes used to insert emoticons. This influx of new, raw and, due to style guides, conditionally justified English borrowings provides a new form of evidence of English having become a nativized foreign language (Prćić 2014) of online communication, which, as a knock-on effect, leads translators and localization teams to consider raw and normally unjustified borrowings as acceptable and appropriate for the target audience that consists of more and more digital natives. The research applies a combination of quantitative and qualitative research methods by means of annotating the 2020 version of Microsoft English-Serbian Bilingual Terminology Database.

Models and methods of designing human-machine interaction-oriented interfaces

Formalization approaches of user interface design (UID) in conjunction with model driven techniques aim to improve the usability in terms of conformity to standards or style guides and to leverage code generation of interactive software systems, so that various UI platforms for web, desktop or mobile Applications are supported. Because large parts of the UI are described platform independent instead of platform dependent implementations, re-usability of the UI concept is also improved. However, UI formalization requires the usage of a formal UI description language and a higher level of abstractness compared to concrete UI code. These languages need to be learned by the UI designer. In practice, most parts of a user interface are still manually designed and coded individually for every platform. This paper describes how HCI (Human Computer Interface) patterns that are described formally can be used in conjunction with model-based user interface design in order to make it easier for the designer to use formalization techniques for the development of user interfaces. The approach uses two UML profiles: The MBUID (Model-Based User Interface Design) profile and the HCI pattern profile. With these profiles formal models of interactive systems can be created on a platform independent level. The user interface is then automatically generated by model-driven development tool chain.

EI4FL Style Guide. Guidelines, instructions and best practices for authors of European Institute for Food Law working papers

This paper provides guidance to authors of European Institute for Food Law working papers. It discusses topics such as the template, style, referencing, lay out, the use of illustrations, and posting a paper online.

A corpus-based study on deontic modality in Competition Law: Insights from the English-Greek language pair

This study investigates deontic modality, the grammatical category through which legal texts express mainly obligation and permission, in an English-Greek bilingual corpus composed of legislative texts related to European Union (EU) Competition Law. More specifically, the study is based on Biel’s discussion on deontic modality, i.e. deontic obligation and deontic permission (Biel 2014: 158). The analysis of the data is mainly quantitative, while a small-scale qualitative analysis is also carried out when necessary. The results of the study are compared with the specific guidelines proposed by the EU Institutions for English and Greek, i.e. the Joint Practical Guide of the European Parliament, the Council and the Commission for persons involved in the drafting of European Union legislation (2015), the English Style Guide: A handbook for authors and translators in the European Commission for English (2018) and the Greek Style Guide: A handbook for authors and translators in the European Commission for Greek (n.d.), as well as with those of earlier studies on legislative texts.

Body As Architecture: Designing the Stout Body in the Age of Standardization

This article explores the curious intersections of stoutwear design, Gestalt Psychology, and architectural discourse in early twentieth-century American fashion media. In doing so, it focuses principally on trade media, style guides and advertisements that grappled with the perceived flaws of the stout woman’s physique and how sophisticated design principles, if properly handled, could create the appearance of bodily slenderness. By moving beyond the biological determinism of contemporary obesity discourse, this article argues that ideas about stoutness and, more specifically, what constituted a stout body, were produced through attempts to contain, control, and correct the fat, female body in fashion design discourse. By further embedding this research within a broader consideration of the relationship between bodies, dress, architecture, and modernist design thinking, this article argues that the mediums and discourses of fashion can open up pathways for thinking about the body itself as “designed.”

Describing, organizing, and maintaining video game development artifacts

AbstractGame development artifacts resulting from the creation process of video games, such as design documents, style guides, test builds, and marketing materials, provide rich contextual information about how and why the game was created. Better organizing and preserving these materials will not only enrich our understanding of the history of these media but also educate and inspire the next generation of video game creators. This research aims to improve our theoretical understanding of how to organize and represent game development artifacts by examining the various types of artifacts created and their attendant issues and challenges. We adopted a multimethod approach employing an examination of existing collections and 29 interviews with creators, information professionals, and game researchers. From these data, we analyze the current practices, expressed values, and perceived challenges of these stakeholders, produce a taxonomy of game development artifacts, and provide best practices recommendations for describing them.

E-Marketplace as a Tool for the Revitalization of Portuguese Craft Industry: The Design Process in the Development of an Online Platform

The craft trade in Portugal faces challenges that compromise its productive and economic sustainability and may result in the disappearance of millenary techniques, traditions, and industrial practices of high symbolic and historical value. The growing incompatibility of these traditional activities with digital technologies, the lack of resources, and a growing age gap are among the main problems identified. This situation made worse by various restrictions pertaining to the COVID-19 pandemic points towards the possibility of extinction of this type of manual arts. The goal of this research is to demonstrate how the design process of an e-marketplace platform, throughout its different phases, may contribute to the revitalization of traditional industries. The methodologies adopted in the framework consisted in the study of UX and UI best design practices, including wireframe design, user flows, definition of personas, development of prototypes, and style guides. The results of the conducted usability tests to the prototype allowed a gradual improvement of the solution, culminating in the confirmation of its effectiveness. The study concluded that digital technology, namely a designed e-marketplace solution, could potentially bring buyers and sellers closer together, thus being a tool with high potential for the dissemination and sustainability of the craft industry.

What’s in a Name? Comparative Analysis of Laboratory Test Naming Guidelines as Applied to Common Confusing Test Names

Abstract Introduction/Objective Laboratory test names frequently do not enable easy understandability or promote correct test utilization, which leads to difficulty for providers in finding the correct test and results in unnecessary cost and medical errors. Laboratory test names are also largely unstandardized and are not named by a consistent set of conventions. To address these issues, the TRUU-Lab (Test Renaming for Understanding & Utilization) initiative aims to generate a consensus test naming guideline for better human understandability of laboratory test names. These studies address the first aim of the TRUU-Lab initiative: to identify root causes and challenges in understanding and using laboratory test names. Methods We conducted survey studies to capture the most problematic laboratory test names, then performed analysis of these names to identify aspects of these names that led to confusion among providers. A subset of these test names were used to evaluate five existing laboratory test naming guidelines (LOINC, ONC TigerTeam, Pan- Canadian iEHR Viewer Name, Standards for Pathology Informatics (Australia), and ARUP Laboratories internal style guides) for their ability to produce understandable test names. Results 274 survey responses yielded ~100 unique laboratory tests cited as confusing, and highlighted substantial diversity both in the names of these tests between institutions and in respondent opinion on the best alternative names. The top 10 most commonly-cited tests yielded ≥ 3 unique names, and the top 2 tests (Vitamin D and anti- factor Xa) yielded ≥ 10 unique names. Post-survey analysis identified eight characteristics associated with poor understandability of a test name, including ambiguity, abbreviations, homophones, multiple indications for a single test, proprietary names, synonyms, truncation, and “panels” where components are obfuscated. Existing guidelines produced highly variable names given the same prompt, and varied in their ability to avoid pitfalls associated with poor understandability. Conclusion These studies highlight aspects of existing laboratory test names that lead to confusion among ordering providers, and identify the inability of existing laboratory test naming practices to adequately address these issues. Efforts are ongoing within TRUU-Lab to use these results to inform novel laboratory test naming guidelines to promote universal human understandability.

What’s in a Name? Comparative Analysis of Laboratory Test Naming Guidelines as Applied to Common Confusing Test Names

Abstract Laboratory test names frequently do not enable easy understandability or promote correct test utilization, which leads to difficulty for providers in finding the correct test and results in unnecessary cost and medical errors. As a further complication, laboratory test names are largely unstandardized and are not named based on a consistent set of conventions. To address these issues, the TRUU-Lab (Test Renaming for Understanding & Utilization) initiative aims to generate a consensus laboratory test naming guideline for better human understandability of laboratory test names. These studies address the first and second aims of the TRUU-Lab initiative: 1) to identify root causes and challenges in understanding and using laboratory test names, and 2) to share resources related to potential solutions. We initially conducted survey studies to capture the most commonly problematic laboratory test names, then performed analysis of these names to identify aspects of these names that led to confusion among providers. 274 survey responses yielded ~100 unique laboratory tests that respondents felt were confusing, and highlighted substantial diversity both in the names of these tests between institutions and in respondent opinion on the best alternative names, with the top 10 most commonly-cited tests having at least 3 unique names, and the top 2 tests (Vitamin D and anti-factor Xa) having at least 10 unique names. Post-survey analysis identified eight common characteristics associated with poor understandability of a test name, including ambiguity, abbreviations, homophones, multiple indications for a single test, non-descriptive proprietary names, synonyms, truncation due to software limitations, and €œpanels where test components are obfuscated. A subset of the survey-identified confusing test names were used to evaluate existing laboratory test naming guidelines for their ability to produce understandable test names. Five guidelines, including LOINC, ONC TigerTeam, Pan-Canadian iEHR Viewer Name, Standards for Pathology Informatics (Australia), and ARUP Laboratories internal style guides, were evaluated, and produced highly variable names given the same test name prompt. Further, existing guidelines also varied in their ability to avoid pitfalls previously identified as associated with poor understandability. Together, these studies highlight the aspects of existing laboratory test names that lead to confusion among ordering providers, and identify the inability of existing laboratory test naming practices to adequately address these issues. Efforts are ongoing within TRUU-Lab to use these results to inform novel laboratory test naming guidelines that promote universal human understandability. Work is also ongoing to apply these novel guidelines to generate new candidate test names, and conduct survey analysis to evaluate the effects of new test naming guidelines on understandability and correct test utilization.

Style Guide for Authors

Transforming AnthropologyVolume 28, Issue 2 p. 187-188 Issue InformationFree Access Style Guide for Authors First published: 17 October 2020 https://doi.org/10.1111/traa.12153AboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article. Volume28, Issue2October 2020Pages 187-188 RelatedInformation