32 PRS Proofreading and Editing Service PhD Experts • All Academic Areas • Fast Turnaround • High Quality experiment, and repeat whatever words are necessary at the beginning of a new paragraph to connect it logically to the paragraph before it. Pronouns such as ‘it,’ ‘this’ and ‘they’ should be avoided at the beginning of a new paragraph: even if the antecedent is obvious, starting a paragraph with a pronoun is simply poor style in English, and when the antecedent is not obvious, it’s extremely difficult for your reader to determine exactly what you’re talking about. Use a noun or noun phrase instead to identify your subject at the beginning of a new paragraph and you’ll find that not only your paragraphs, but the logical movement of your paper as a whole will benefit (on the use of pronouns, see also Section 4.4.3). 3.2.2 Using Lists Effectively Some journals provide advice on formatting lists, but it’s rare. Those that do tend to offer very specific guidelines, asking authors to use bulleted lists or not, to use numbers or letters instead of bullets depending on the placement of a list (within the body of a paragraph or separate), or to use a full stop or a semi-colon after each item depending on the length and grammatical nature of the items. If instructions of this kind are provided, read them carefully and follow them precisely – the journal editors wouldn’t have bothered to provide all those details if they didn’t want lists formatted exactly as they describe. In most cases, however, such instructions won’t be provided and you will need to figure out for yourself how best to present information in lists, and whatever methods you choose as most effective for the information you need to present, balance and parallelism will be essential. This is to say that each item in the list PARt II: PRePARIng, PResentIng And PolIsHIng YoUR woRk