General Comments for Micro-Reviews

Style, Spelling, Grammar, Punctuation, and Format

Take the time to write high-quality micro-reviews. They are short, so you should be able to re-read them at least once to make sure there are no spelling errors or types, and that your sentences are grammatically correct.

Here is a check list you can use:

• Do not use contractions in academic writing. For example, “didn’t” should be “did not”, “wouldn’t” should be “would not”, “it’s” should be “it is”.

• The possessive form of “it” is “its”, not “it’s”.

• Remember your articles. For example, “… recognizing user’s hand …” should be “… recognizing the user’s hand …” and “In evaluation part …” should be “In the evaluation part …”

• We are in Canada, so you should use Canadian spelling. For example, “color” should be “colour” and “behavior” should be “behaviour”.

• Avoid using a slash in academic writing. For example, “and/or” can be writing simply as “or” and multiple terms like “student/teacher” can be linked like “student and teacher”.

• Avoid using “etc.” when listing several points, and write your sentence to make it clear you are only providing a few examples. For example, “uses the colours red, blue, green, etc.” can be written as “uses colours like red, blue, or green.”

• Use consistent terminology and spelling. For example, stick with “smartphone” rather than sometimes calling it a “smart phone” or a “cellphone”.

Critique

Focus on strengths, weaknesses, and extensions that involve the experimental methods used and the experiments presented. Avoid comments strengths or weaknesses solely focused on an interaction technique for example. You should focus on how well the experiments presented supports the claims of the paper. Avoid extensions focused only on improving an interaction technique, for example. If you would have to re-run an experiment, what would you do?

Other points:

• Focus on one thing for your strength, one thing for your weakness, and one thing for your extension. Those things do not need to be related.

• Your strength should not be so high level that it essentially summarized the main contribution of the paper. Pick something specific that you liked about the research and focus on that.

• Try to think of weaknesses that are not simply related to things like the prototype size, battery life, or cost. These really are not important for this line of research, and in most cases, they can be improved with further engineering and economies of scale.