Keck Northeast Astronomy Consortium: guidelines for symposium paper writing

Students who present a talk or a poster on their research at the 2007 Fall Symposium will be writing a short paper to be published in the proceedings of the symposium. The proceedings are sent out to more than one hundred scientists and departments, and are indexed by ADS.

Attention students: Beginning work on your paper before the beginning of classes is a very good idea. It is due, as a MS Word document, at the close of the symposium on September 29. Papers are limited to four pages for single-author papers, and six pages for two-author papers. Please use this template as a starting point for your paper; and see the notes from the editor, below. Submit your paper to Dr. Steven Souza (ssouza -at- williams.edu). Send Dr. Souza, by email, a copy of the working .doc version of your paper, plus a pdf copy so that he can make sure it looks as it's supposed to when he typesets the proceedings. If you cannot generate a PDF from your MS Word file, bring a hardcopy to the meeting and give it to Dr. Souza.

From this year's proceedings editor, Steve Souza:

Take advantage of the style sheets for MS Word found in the template. You must tell me at the time of submission whether the document was created on a Mac or in Windows. The appearance of the document, especially of embedded images, can depend on the system in which the image was originally created/edited. Slight differences between the systems often lead to pagination problems; we both can be spared some grief if I know in advance the correct platform, and if you use use the MS Word style sheets!

Please do not violate the margin, line spacing, and font size aspects of the MS Word "knac2000" predefined styles. In particular, do not make the text font smaller than 12-point, nor figure caption text smaller than 10-point. I will enforce these regulations; if such enforcement upsets the pagination or layout, I may be forced to make corrections less appropriate than those you can make yourselves in advance!

Please convert all figures and images to black & white, if appropriate, or grayscale. We do not print the proceedings in color, so to ensure accurate and readable rendering of your graphics, do the conversions yourselves. Don't depend on me; I don't know as well as do you how the figures and images should look. In particular, graphs that used different colors for different data series may become, upon printing in grayscale, indecipherable. You can mitigate this by varying line types (solid to dotted, etc.) and fill textures as substitutes for color differences.

Deadline: It is never too early to submit your paper, providing you've completed the work! Submission prior to the close of the September 28-29 symposium is required. "Submission" means a final, correctly formatted (use the style sheet!), proofread and spell-checked, electronic MS Word file plus a pdf version emailed to the editor, or hardcopy handed in at the symposium in place of the pdf.

And to avoid common errors:

The American spelling of "acknowledgment" has only two e's. Similarly, "judgment" has only one e.
PowerPoint is a trademark, and is one word with a capital P in the middle as well as the one that begins it.
"its" is the possessive and "it's" means, always, "it is."
"alright" is not the accepted spelling of "all right."
In SI units, unit names aren't capitalized (angstroms, kelvins, joules) while symbols for units that are named after people are capitalized (A, K, J) (with the exception of a capitalized L for "liter"; there was no French Monsieur Litre).
Periods and commas ALWAYS go within quotation marks. Semicolons and colons go outside the quotation marks. To give a "correct example": "Wonderful," she exclaimed, "wow"; "it was a remarkably beautiful supernova."

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