39 PRS Proofreading and Editing Service PhD Experts • All Academic Areas • Fast Turnaround • High Quality All of these Latin terms mean ‘and the others’ and because ‘et’ is the complete Latin word for ‘and,’ a full stop should never follow the ‘et’ part. A full stop should follow ‘al.,’ however, but do check the journal guidelines or style manual you’re following because some will call for ‘et al’ without the final full stop and some will require the use of italics on the abbreviation. Generally speaking, ‘et al.’ is the only one of these Latin abbreviations that can be used in the main text of formal academic or scientific prose as well as in parenthetical material: ‘Jackson et al. (2013) argued that…’ or ‘In this study (Jackson et al, 2013) it is argued that….’ (on the use of ‘et al.,’ see also Section 5.2.1). The most notorious of abbreviations is the acronym, an abbreviation made up of the first letters of all the words or only the main words in a name or term: WHO for the World Health Organization is a well- known example. With the exception of a few acronyms that are better known than the terms they abbreviate – IQ and AIDS, for instance – each acronym you use in your paper should be formally introduced by presenting the full version of the term or name along with the abbreviated version (in parentheses) before the acronym is ever used on its own: ‘the World Health Organization (WHO) reported….’ Make sure that you position the abbreviated form to represent accurately exactly what the acronym abbreviates – ‘the critical time gap (CTG) test revealed…,’ not ‘the critical time gap test (CTG) revealed…’ – and that your subsequent use of the acronym reflects that placement (CTG meaning ‘critical time gap’ but not ‘test’ as well). If you use an acronym for a corporate author in an in-text citation (WHO, 2012), you can simply introduce the full term and acronym in reverse order in the reference list: WHO (World Health Organization) instead of World Health Organization (WHO). This ensures that your reader will be able to find the reference easily in your list, but also provides complete bibliographical information. If PARt II: PRePARIng, PResentIng And PolIsHIng YoUR woRk