23 PRS Proofreading and Editing Service PhD Experts • All Academic Areas • Fast Turnaround • High Quality PARt II: PRePARIng, PResentIng And PolIsHIng YoUR woRk such as considering a 10-point font too small for readers or preferring double spacing for clarity. Journal guidelines can also be helpful in ways not necessarily intended by the journal. For example, if the guidelines use ‘e-mail’ (with a hyphen rather than without one), the hyphenated form is almost certainly the best one to use in your paper. Do be careful, however, because journal guidelines can be as inconsistent as other texts online (‘e-mail’ may be used in one paragraph and ‘email’ in the next), so keep your eyes open to such inconsistencies, which can also crop up in the specific instructions offered to authors. You might have just determined, for instance, from the description of referencing formats provided in a set of guidelines that you definitely need a full stop after each date in a reference list, only to discover that the very next example provided by the journal does not use one. In such cases, you can always consult articles already published by the journal to see how their authors dealt successfully with such confusing instructions, but in the end a decision about which format will be best in your own paper will need to be made, and whether you choose to use that full stop or not, it’s essential to be consistent and use the same format throughout your paper. Indeed, as with so many other aspects of preparing academic or scientific writing for publication, a combination of accuracy and consistency is the name of the game when following journal guidelines. Many scholars consider matters of presentation and formatting secondary to the research, results and argument of a paper, and in literal terms, this is true: without the content of a paper, there is nothing to format or present. Whether the format of an article is considered a priority by academics and scientists or not, however, effective formatting can greatly increase the clarity of