PRS Tip: It’s amazing how details can be right before the eyes and still slip past unnoticed, but such is the case with incorrect punctuation, familiar abbreviations and spelling variations. Sometimes this is because the detail is small and unobtrusive: a full stop is tiny, after all, and a semi-colon looks much like a colon when there’s no time to do more than glance at it. At other times it’s due to not knowing – everyone has to look up the differences between American and British English at times. At still other times such negligence is paradoxically caused by knowing the material too well: I’ve seen more than one paper in which an author works to define every acronym that’s used once or twice (and even some that aren’t used again at all), only to neglect providing a definition for an abbreviation that’s unusual, used 50 or 100 times in the paper and absolutely central to the data and argument. A classic case of being so immersed in one’s own work that it becomes difficult to see what the audience might need, this forces a guessing game on readers (except those lucky enough to know the meaning already) and leads to frustration and potential misunderstanding. Fortunately, the PRS proofreading team has many eyes well trained in the detection of such problems, and the time to attend to them thoroughly and with precision. 44 PRS Proofreading and Editing Service PhD Experts • All Academic Areas • Fast Turnaround • High Quality 4.4 Finding Your scholarly voice Although any author should work to establish a voice of authority when writing, this is nowhere more important than in academic and scientific prose: as a scholarly writer, you need to assume a professional stance and sound in every way like you know exactly what you’re talking about. In order to do this, it’s essential that you do PARt II: PRePARIng, PResentIng And PolIsHIng YoUR woRk