46 PRS Proofreading and Editing Service PhD Experts • All Academic Areas • Fast Turnaround • High Quality applications, as well as research papers, theses and scholarly books. The rewards of polishing your writing skills are significant, and there’s always the possibility of discovering that carefully crafted formal prose is a rather effective means of expressing complex ideas. One of the easiest and most obvious ways in which to increase the formality as well as the precision of your writing is to choose your vocabulary with special care. This can mean using the exact same word repeatedly or varying your vocabulary, with each of these appropriate in different situations and for different reasons. Adding variety to your vocabulary is essential to producing an eloquent writing style that will hold the interest of readers, and many words in a sentence can easily be changed to create variety without altering meaning. Avoid, for instance, starting every sentence with ‘however,’ ‘therefore,’ ‘thus,’ ‘moreover’ or ‘furthermore’ – use these but mix them up in your prose. Use ‘particularly’ in some instances and ‘especially’ in others; use ‘as well as’ instead of ‘and’ at times, and ‘yet’ or ‘however’ instead of ‘but.’ When reporting results of trials and tests, vary ‘showed’ with ‘revealed’ or ‘suggested’ or ‘indicated,’ and when comparing ideas, categories and results, use ‘more than’ and ‘less than’ as well as ‘compared with’ and ‘contrasted with.’ Be careful, however, when eliminating words to vary your language. For example, in ‘pink shirts were given to 12 of the men, but blue to women’ the reader easily supplies the verb (‘were given’) missing from the second half of the sentence and it’s also fairly clear that ‘blue’ stands for ‘blue shirts,’ but he or she may be wondering ‘to what women?’ Does the author mean all of the women in the study although only 12 of the men were given shirts? Clearly, more information is needed here, and those of a more traditional persuasion would say that all the missing words should be included when it comes to reporting precise data about methods and results. PARt II: PRePARIng, PResentIng And PolIsHIng YoUR woRk