41 4.3 Punctuating Appropriately Pause and Effect, the title of an acclaimed book on the punctuation of late-medieval manuscripts,1 neatly summarises a primary function of punctuation: punctuation tells your reader when to ‘pause’ and can have an enormous ‘effect’ on the ability of your prose to communicate your thoughts clearly. Punctuation has a number of other functions as well, and can mean the difference between your carefully crafted sentences functioning successfully or failing. Sentences that lack necessary punctuation or use punctuation incorrectly can end up saying something very different from what you intended. There is no one set of universal rules to follow when punctuating English prose, however, and each sentence, whether long or short, laden with parenthetical clauses or straight to the point, is a unique construct that must be punctuated individually and with care. As with so many other aspects of an academic or scientific paper, effective punctuation requires precision and consistency, and there are some basic principles and patterns that should be observed. First, take care to read whatever the journal’s guidelines may say about punctuation. It’s rare to find much if any advice on punctuation in author instructions, but there are instances of very specific requirements. The use of a comma before ‘and’ in lists of three or more items is an example: some journals will want the comma (‘birds, butterflies, and bees’) and some will not (‘birds, butterflies and bees’); if a journal’s guidelines bother to advise authors either way, take that advice to heart and apply it consistently. The use of a comma in conjunction with an ‘and’ that opens an additional independent clause in a sentence comes to mind as another punctuation issue I’ve seen addressed in journal guidelines. Further advice on this and other punctuation usage patterns is sometimes provided in academic and scientific style manuals as well (APA, Chicago, etc.), so if the journal PARt II: PRePARIng, PResentIng And PolIsHIng YoUR woRk 1 Malcolm Parkes, Pause and Effect: Punctuation in the West (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993).