88 PRS Proofreading and Editing Service PhD Experts • All Academic Areas • Fast Turnaround • High Quality Automatic referencing, for instance, may achieve a format very close to the style you need, but one particular detail will consistently be wrong, or unusual or complicated references will be formatted in inappropriate ways. So each reference will need to be checked and, if necessary, corrected manually. Automatic numbering of lists and sections usually comes out accurately, but sometimes an item or heading is typed or pasted into a document in such a way that the programme doesn’t recognise that it needs to be numbered, and while this may be simple enough to remedy in a list of six items, when misnumbering occurs in the sections of a paper that contains many subsections and cross references based on that incorrect numbering, the problem can quickly increase in magnitude and take considerable time and attention to repair. So if you let your word processing programme number your sections, watch what it’s doing as you write and correct any errors immediately before they grow into larger problems. On the whole, automatic formatting is a useful tool and virtually unavoidable in the world of modern publishing – who, for instance, wouldn’t use Word’s automatic formatting for footnotes? As a writer who remembers how tricky it was to lay out footnotes effectively on the page before there was such a tool, I couldn’t imagine not using it. However, that otherwise wonderful footnoting function can introduce glitches, and footnotes have a nasty habit of suddenly disappearing (at the bottom of the page, not in the main text) as a complex document is edited and the programme faces the challenge of rearranging notes and text on a rapidly changing page. The notes aren’t usually actually gone and generally a little fiddling can bring them back, but there are instances where I’ve had to retype footnotes. Automatic referencing, on the other hand, can complicate the editing process, with in-text citations sometimes proving difficult to change, the reference list occasionally shifting position in a paper when the document is copied (into a clean copy after proofreading, for example) and the block format PARt II: PRePARIng, PResentIng And PolIsHIng YoUR woRk