43 PRS Proofreading and Editing Service PhD Experts • All Academic Areas • Fast Turnaround • High Quality independent sections of a long and complex sentence (or sometimes the items of a list that forms a long sentence) in places where a comma simply won’t sufficiently clarify the sentence structure and meaning. • Hyphenation can be incredibly tricky because dictionaries, style manuals and sometimes journal guidelines can all indicate different patterns and rules – ‘intersubjectivity’ or ‘inter-subjectivity,’ ‘nonsignificant’ or ‘non-significant,’ ‘reintroduce’ or ‘re-introduce’ and so on. If the journal you’re submitting to does not provide specific instructions or a specific style (such as Chicago) to follow, the best policy is to adopt a system and stick to it, remembering that certain compounds should always be hyphenated: when two vowels would end up back to back without the hyphen (re- establish), when confusion could result were the term closed (‘re- create,’ which has a different meaning than ‘recreate’), when the second element bears a capital (non-English) or is a numeral (pre- 1990s), and when a compound adjective appears before a noun (a ‘well-known theory’ but a ‘theory that is well known’). • Finally, although indicated by tiny apostrophes that can get lost at times, possessives should always be accurately punctuated with the general rule being that the apostrophe appears before the ‘s’ in the singular form (student’s) and after it in the plural (students’), though there are, as always in English, exceptions: ‘men’s,’ for example, which does not use an ‘s’ for the plural form, so the ‘s’ is there solely to indicate the possessive and the apostrophe appears before it. Try not to overuse possessives: particularly in their plural form, they can become awkward in English, so it’s often best to write out a phrase using ‘of’ instead of stacking possessives: ‘the participants’ fathers’ occupations,’ for instance, is clearer and more elegant as ‘the occupations of the participants’ fathers.’ On the use of quotation marks, see Section 5.2.1 below. PARt II: PRePARIng, PResentIng And PolIsHIng YoUR woRk