Tips for technical writing

Some pointers to websites giving advices on how to write (in good english) a paper:

http://www.ece.ucdavis.edu/~jowens/commonerrors.html
http://www.lightbluetouchpaper.org/2007/03/14/how-not-to-write-an-abstract/
http://www.you-can-teach-writing.com/grammar_websites.html
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/publ-tips/

Selected quotes:

Capitalization of headlines. In the United States, it is a common practice to capitalize the first letter of more words in headlines and titles than in normal sentences. The style guides and author’s instructions of U.S. publishers, such as the IEEE, require this. On the other hand, in Britain, in many other English-speaking countries, and in many international organizations, professional typographers use in headlines exactly the same capitalization rules as in normal sentences, namely only the first word and proper nouns or abbreviations are capitalized.
(source)

Every time you use the passive voice, a kitten is killed by God.
(Simon Crowley)

“We built a high-performance implementation.” “high-performance” is hyphenated because “high” modifies “performance” not “implementation”. It's not a “high implementation”. Here, “high-performance” is an adjective. But: “Our implementation has high performance.” Here, “performance” is a noun. No hyphen. Similarly: “throughput-oriented workloads” or “GPU-based implementation”.
(source)

“et al.” is not italicized or underlined (van Leunen, p. 27: “Write it without either underlining or italics.”; Chicago Manual of Style 7.56: “Commonly used Latin words and abbreviations should not be italicized. ibid, et al., ca., passim.” [and later, 6.44: “Note that ‘e.g.’ and ‘i.e.’ are not italicized.”]).
(source)