Coordinating Conjunctions in English: And, But and Yet The English language boasts seven coordinating conjunctions that are immensely useful to scholars who write to disseminate their research. In alphabetical order they are AND, BUT, FOR, OR, NOR, SO, and YET,…
Planning the Structure of a Successful Academic Research Paper
Planning the Structure of a Successful Academic Research Paper Although most scholarly authors begin drafting an academic or scientific paper with a relatively clear idea of the research that must be reported and the argument that must be presented in…
Planning Your Academic Research Time for Maximum Success
Planning Your Academic Research Time for Maximum Success Most academics and scientists employed by universities enjoy enough time free from teaching that those in other occupations might think such scholars have all the time in the world to complete their…
Ready to Revise, but Writing to the Journal Editor?
Ready to Revise, but Writing to the Journal Editor? A few days ago you received a message from the editor of that journal you were hoping might publish your paper, but the message did not contain the positive news you…
The Pros and Cons of Reviewing Academic and Scientific Writing
The Pros and Cons of Reviewing Academic and Scientific Writing If you are considering reviewing academic or scientific writing, it is wise to reflect both seriously and realistically on the full implications of the tasks you will be performing. Whatever…
A Guidelines Checklist for Academic and Scientific Articles
A Guidelines Checklist for Academic and Scientific Articles If you are preparing a research article that you hope to publish in an academic or scientific journal, it is essential to pay close attention to the journal guidelines. Most scholarly journals…
Deciding on a Plan of Action for a Rejected Manuscript
Deciding on a Plan of Action for a Rejected Manuscript In order to decide how to proceed when facing the revision of a manuscript rejected by the acquisitions editor of a scholarly journal or press, you will first need to…
Four Aspects of Academic& Scientific Texts That Require an Extra Check
Four Aspects of Scholarly Texts That Require an Extra Check In the proofreading business, especially when your clientele is international, you see many different kinds of problems in the documents scholars plan to publish, present, submit, post or disseminate in…
Hurdles in the Academic Writing Process Can Inspire the Largest Leaps
Hurdles in the Writing Process Can Inspire the Largest Leaps Writing academic or scientific prose is never easy. A great deal of thinking, planning and outlining is usually required before writing even begins, and although the drafting process can proceed…
The Pros & Cons of Academic & Scientific Performance & Organisation
The Pros and Cons of Scholarly Organisation The concept of organisation is fashionable at present, which is not to say that people are any more organised now than they have been in the past. In fact, the proliferation of books…
The Sharp Learning Curve of Academic and Scientific Self-Publishing
The Sharp Learning Curve of Self-Publishing | Tips on How to Get Your Research Published The idea of self-publishing has raised a flurry of passionate opinions and valid arguments both pro and con. The reality is beyond debate, however. Self-publishing…
Those Tricky Transitions in Scholarly Text
Those Tricky Transitions in Scholarly Text | Tips on How to Get Your Research Published Creating smooth and effective transitions is among the most challenging aspects of writing well. In fiction or poetry a transition might aim to startle or…
Three Kinds of Peer Review used by Academic and Scientific Journals
Three Kinds of Peer Review: Pros and Cons | Tips on How to Get Your Research Published There are three different types of peer review that are used by academic and scientific journals. They are known as single blind review,…
Two Latin Abbreviations Frequently Used in Academic & Scientific Writing: ‘etc.’ and ‘et al.’
Two Latin Abbreviations Frequently Used in Scholarly Writing: ‘etc.’ and ‘et al.’ | Tips on How to Get Your Research Published Although most of the Latin abbreviations that were once so common in academic and scientific writing are used much…
Using the Right Words in Academic and Scientific Writing
Using the Right Words in Academic and Scientific Writing | Tips on How to Get Your Research Published Mark Twain, in keeping with both his personality and his writing style, claimed that ‘the difference between the almost right word and…
What Do Journal Editors Want from Peer Reviewers?
What Do Journal Editors Want from Peer Reviewers? | Tips on How to Get Your Research Published On one level, the answer to this question is a simple one. The proofreaders of scholarly journals want peer reviewers who send them…
What To Do When Your Academic Writing Has Been Misunderstood
What To Do When Your Writing Has Been Misunderstood | Tips on How to Get Your Research Published Authors are misunderstood and misread every day for reasons related to their text and for reasons far beyond their control. This is…
What You Should Not Do While Writing a Peer Review
What You Should Not Do While Writing a Peer Review Although there is plenty of advice available on peer reviewing for scientific journals, that advice tends to blend the discussion of what a reviewer should not do with that of…
Frequently Used and Misused Latin Abbreviations in Academic and Scientific Writing
Frequently Used and Misused Latin Abbreviations | Tips on How to Get Your Research Published Although Latin abbreviations appear far less often in scholarly writing than they once did, there are still a few that are used with considerable frequency….
Helpful Tips and Advice on Using Parenthetical Clauses Effectively
Helpful Tips and Advice on Using Parenthetical Clauses Effectively Contemporary advice about writing tends to prioritise simplicity, even for academic and scientific writing, so simple sentences are preferred by many publishers and online venues, including scholarly ones. As a reaction…
Productive Scholarly Collaboration among Academics and Scientists
Productive Scholarly Collaboration among Academics and Scientists Scholarly collaboration is a wide-ranging concept that is extremely popular in many of today’s academic and scientific circles. Collaboration may refer to anything from reading each other’s articles and offering constructive commentary to…
Taking Notes and Developing Ideas Related to Academic Research
Taking Notes and Developing Ideas Related to Academic Research Avid readers can certainly sympathise with Robert Louis Stevenson’s admission that he always kept a book in his pocket so that he would have something to read no matter where he…
The ABCs of Alphabetical Order in Reference Lists and Bibliographies
The ABCs of Alphabetical Order in Reference Lists and Bibliographies | Tips on How to Get Your Research Published Academic and scientific writing tends to include a large number of citations and require a rather lengthy list of references so…
The Enduring Value of a Good Appendix in Academic and Scientific Writing
The Enduring Value of a Good Appendix in Academic and Scientific Papers With competition for publishing space steeper than ever, and the word and length limits set by publishers tighter all the time, it is perhaps little wonder that appendices…
A Constructive Approach to the Challenging Task of Peer Reviewing
A Constructive Approach to the Challenging Task of Peer Reviewing | Tips on How to Get Your Research Published You have just decided to accept the invitation of a journal editor to peer review a scientific article. The paper is…
The Fine Art of Writing (and Reading) Informative and Interesting Footnotes and Endnotes
The Fine Art of Writing (and Reading) Informative and Interesting Footnotes and Endnotes | Tips on How to Get Your Research Published There was a time when footnotes were a staple of scholarly writing, each page of a university press’s…
Checking and Correcting Academic References Effectively and Efficiently
Checking and Correcting References Effectively and Efficiently | Tips on How to Get Your Research Published Very few scholars enjoy adding references to their manuscripts, and the time and effort needed to check and correct them before submitting writing for…
Effectively Recycling and Reusing Scholarly Text
Effectively Recycling and Reusing Scholarly Text | Tips on How to Get Your Research Published There is certainly no lack of text in the modern world, with the internet being a primary provider of reading material for an increasingly wider…
Using Prepositions to Specify Place with Accuracy in the English Language
Using Prepositions to Specify Place with Accuracy Prepositions may tend to be rather short words, but their functions within English sentences are extremely important. They tend to indicate grammatical and semantic relationships, often of a spatial or temporal nature. A…
How to Write a Covering Letter to the Journal Editor
Writing Your First Covering Letter to an Acquisitions Editor It is reasonable to suppose that the grand majority of academic and scientific authors believe the work they submit to scholarly journals and presses for potential publication is eminently publishable. If…
Reformatting a Rejected Academic or Scientific Manuscript
Reformatting a Rejected Academic or Scientific Manuscript Academic and scientific manuscripts are rejected by the acquisitions proofreaders of scholarly presses and journals for a wide variety of reasons. Of these a failure to format a document exactly as a publisher…
Responses to Journal Editors: Clarifying Intentions
Response to an Acquisitions Editor: Clarifying Intentions Although no scholar finds it remotely difficult to accept good news from an acquisitions editor, receiving and responding to less than positive commentary can be extremely challenging. The starting point is, after all,…
A Few Tiny but Tricky Words with Similar Sounds but Different Spellings
Similar Sounds with Different Spellings and Meanings: A Few Tiny but Tricky Words Many a word in the English language sounds, when spoken, exactly like or at least deceptively similar to another word. When such pairs are spelled out in…
Table Footnotes that focuses on source, specific and probability notes
Table Footnotes: Source, Specific and Probability Notes Technically speaking, there are four different kinds of footnotes that appear at the bottom of the tables so frequently used to present data in academic and especially scientific writing. The general notes are…
The Beneficial Process of Editorial Criticism and Authorial Revision
The Beneficial Process of Editorial Criticism and Authorial Revision | Tips on How to Get Your Research Published It is perhaps rare for scientific and academic authors to see the criticism of their writing offered by acquisitions proofreaders as part…
Formal Academic and Scientific Prose and Successful Publication
Formal Scholarly Prose and Successful Publication | Tips on How to Get Your Research Published There are in the twenty-first century a wide variety of informal ways in which to disseminate text, even the kinds of academic and scientific text…
Footnotes for Academic and Scientific Tables to Present Research Data
Footnotes for Scholarly Tables: General Notes Scholarly writing often contains a large number of complex tables to present complicated data in the most effective and accessible ways possible. The function and compact format of tables tend to necessitate the use…
Line Spacing and Indentation in Microsoft Word for Academic Authors
Line Spacing and Indentation in Microsoft Word | Tips on How to Get Your Research Published In the academic and scientific proofreading business, one encounters manuscripts of all shapes and sizes. Scholars face a wide variety of challenges in presenting…
Tips on Using Latin Abbreviations for Citations & Cross References
Tips on Using Latin Abbreviations for Citations & Cross References Although many of the Latin abbreviations once frequent in scholarly writing for referring to sources and other information are, in the twenty-first century, used with increasing rarity, some presses and…
Signs of Unclear Communication and How To Fix the Problem
Signs of Unclear Communication and How To Fix the Problem | Tips on How to Get Your Research Published In this text-rich world of mass online communication, readers have become rather adept at reading right over errors and providing their…
Peer Reviewers are People Too…and Generous Scholars as Well
Peer Reviewers are People Too…and Generous Scholars as Well Given the stiff competition for publication space in top-tier journals, it is little wonder that many academic and scientific authors tend to think of the peer review process as tantamount to…
The Benefits of Using the Active Voice in Academic and Scientific Writing
The Benefits of Using the Active Voice in Scholarly Writing | Tips on How to Get Your Research Published It was once considered appropriate for almost all scholarship to adopt the passive voice. The goal behind this policy was to…
Miscellaneous Uses of Hyphenation in the English Language
Miscellaneous Uses of Hyphenation in the English Language In my earlier posts on the use of hyphens, I discussed patterns for hyphenating compounds and adding prefixes and suffixes to words. In this post I would like to describe a number…
The Pros and Cons of Procrastination, Taking the Time for Critical Reflection
The Pros and Cons of Procrastination, Taking the Time for Critical Reflection Yes, you read that correctly. I intend to discuss the pros or positive aspects of procrastination as well as the cons or negative ones. My focus here is…
Using Pronouns Clearly & Effectively In Academic & Scientific Writing
Using Pronouns Clearly and Effectively It is difficult to imagine writing scholarly prose in the English language without using pronouns. Were academic and scientific authors forced to use nouns repeatedly instead of substituting pronouns at times, their books and articles…
Using Prepositions Correctly to Specify Time in the English Language
Using Prepositions Correctly to Specify Time Prepositions are a class of words that indicate grammatical and semantic relationships, often of a spatial or temporal nature. A preposition is usually combined with a noun, pronoun or noun phrase, which is referred…
Dealing with Journal Rejection – It is Not Always Hopeless as It Seems
Dealing with Journal Rejection – It is Not Always Hopeless as It Seems There are few more devastating moments in an academic or scientific career than one in which you learn that the journal paper you worked so hard to…
Editing to Lengthen and Add Substance to an Academic or Scientific Paper
Editing To Lengthen & Add Substance to an Academic or Scientific Paper Although some scholars are extremely verbose when it comes to writing up the results of their research, there are many other academics and scientists who struggle with producing…
Forming and Using Present Participles in the English Language
Forming and Using Present Participles in the English Language Present participles perform more than one important function in the English language. They can, for instance, act as adjectives to modify nouns, as nouns themselves or as aspects of compound verbs,…
Notes & Advice on Mastering the Future Tense in Academic Writing
Mastering Tense in the English Language: The Future In my earlier posts on mastering tense I discussed the present and past tenses of English verbs. In this post I would like to provide some advice on the four basic future…