SR1: Use of LaTeX of TeX: It is generally recommended that you use LaTeX or TeX for writing theses and research papers in Computer Science, Math, and other technical disciplines. Other tools, such as Microsoft Word, can be used but it generally harder to achieve the same style and aesthetic level of typesetting.
SR2: Single quotes, double quotes: Proper opening and closing
single quotes should be used. If you use TeX (including LaTeX),
this means that opening single quote is typed as `
(backquote), closing quote is typed as ' (quote),
and opening double quote is typed as `` (two
backquotes), and closing double quote is typed as ''
(two quotes). The double-quote character (") should generally not be
used in TeX, with some exceptions in typewriter font (\tt) when used
for example to show program code. (good reference: TeXbook)
SR3: Citation as a word: Do not use citations as words or phrases in a sentence -- they are just annotation, so should be "invisible" for reading flow of the sentence. For example, instead of "Dijkstra in [14] published..." one should write "Dijkstra [14] published...". Other examples of use of citations as words are "[5] discusses...", "The following paper [6] compares...", "Another relevant paper, namely [8], ..." which should simply be "Another relevant paper [8]...", etc.
SR4: No citations in abstract: Do not include citations in abstract. The abstract should be written in such way that if someone has only the title and abstract available, they should be self-contained and they should get some information about the paper that does not require looking up the full paper.
SR5: Em-dash and other dashes: Always use the appropriate dashes, and TeX (including LaTeX) makes it easy. Use hyphen (single -) for compound words like "e-mail", use em-dash (triple --- in TeX) for intersentence punctuation---like this, use en-dash (double -- in TeX) for number ranges, like 2--12, and use math minus ($-$ in TeX) for mathematical minus like in $12-7=5$.
SR6: Long variable names: In TeX math mode, use \textit{...} for long variable names, to have them properly formatted. Otherwise, kerning between letters is wrong, and any hyphen is interpreted as a minus sign for example.
SR7: Capitalizations of Titles: Titles of papers, theses, chapters, sections, and subsections should be properly capitalized. All words should start with capital (i.e., upper-case) letters except some very frequent functional words such as "the", "in", "of", and similar. This is called the Title Case and it is for example required by the FGS thesis format guidelines of the Dalhousie University.
SR8: Line breaks: An end of line should not appear at some
places in text even though there are spaces at those positions. For example,
a line should not be broken between words "Mr." and "Smith", or just before
a citation like "[53]" so that the citation appears at the beginning of a
line. This is prevented by use of a non-breakable space, which is called a
tie in TeX and LaTeX and is obtained by use of the tilde
(~) character.
In Word, it is obtained by inserting non-brekable space as a special
character, and in HTML it is obtained by the entity.
The most common place where a tie should be used is before citations,
such as Smith~\cite{refid}, or Smith {\it et
al.}~\cite{refid}.
It should also be used at the end of a list, as in A, B, C, and~D.,
after titles such as Dr.~Knuth, Mr.~Smith, and similar.
This is well-discussed in the TeXbook.
Motivation: Motivation for the research problem should be clearly presented. The primary section to present motivation is the first, Introduction, section, but it is sometimes important to make it clear even in the abstract. Under the term `motivation', we basically mean a justification why it is worth exploring this problem. To express it in other words, motivation is about this problem is significant, why will the world be a better place if we solve this problem, are we going to save some time, money, or lives if we solve this problem, why should we care about this problem. This is a part of four important questions about contribution emphasized in Brecht's page: What is new, different, better, significant? The "significant" part is about motivation. For example, we may want to study the question about whether a buttered toast indeed lands more frequently on its butter-side when it falls on the floor, but is really a significant question worth our time and attention. BTW, it may be interpreted as a subjective question but remember that it is not sufficient to believe it ourselves but we need to convince a reader too that it is worth their reading time.