24 PRS Proofreading and Editing Service PhD Experts • All Academic Areas • Fast Turnaround • High Quality a paper and it is most certainly a priority for the editors of journals: were it not, there would be no point in providing instructions for authors. Formatting is the most visible aspect of a paper and can be checked at a glance, which means that it is often used by editors as a measure of many other elements of a paper that take much more time to identify and judge. By ignoring author guidelines and presenting your work in an inappropriate, incorrect or inconsistent format, you provide an overworked editor inundated with stacks of submissions the opportunity to clear one more piece of work off his or her desk, often without even reading your abstract. The assumption that there is a correlation between the quality of scholarship in a paper and the quality of its presentation is not always correct – good scholarship can be hidden in poorly prepared papers, after all, and beautifully presented work can contain poor scholarship – but there is nonetheless truth in the idea that an author who can accurately and consistently follow instructions and format his or her paper just as the journal would have it is also an academic or scientist who reads and refers to sources and reports methods and results in accurate and meaningful ways. Exactitude and precision are, after all, not just required by journals, but also elements of quality scholarship, and there is no doubt that many editors think about guidelines and scholarship in precisely these ways: a well-organised paper heralds a well-organised mind. Such compliance on the part of authors also indicates to an editor their willingness to be accommodating and work effectively with the journal to achieve successful publication. So the primary message here is to make your paper look as good to the journal you’ve chosen for submission as you believe the work that went into the paper is – you’ve put lot of time and effort into writing your article, so it certainly deserves the chance to shine. PARt II: PRePARIng, PResentIng And PolIsHIng YoUR woRk