Is improving your scientific writing among your goals for the new year? If so, you might start by revisiting the five most-read posts on The Scientist’s English for 2012: 1. Adverb placement 2. Dangling infinitives 3. Shortening your paper or abstract 4. Illogical comparisons 5. Implied antecedents for “those” and that” I look forward to providing more tips in 2013. [...]
It’s difficult to find a book on scientific writing that doesn’t inveigh against weak verbs and nominalizations, and in previous posts, I’ve suggested ways to find them in your papers and eliminate them (here, here, and here). In this post, I want to point out another one: “served as,” as in Metallic nickel served as [...]
The conjunction “or” can be used not only to indicate two or more alternatives but also to indicate synonymous or equivalent expressions. When used for the latter purpose, “or” can be translated as “also referred to as,” “defined as,” or “in other words,” and sentences containing such an appositional “or” are punctuated differently than sentences [...]
Compound adjectives constructed from a noun plus the past participle of a verb are used frequently in English. Consider, for example, the sentence The skiers raced down the snow-covered slopes. Here, “snow-covered” is a compound adjective constructed from the noun “snow” and the past participle of the verb “to cover.” The compound describes the slopes; [...]
Pick up any usage book and you’ll be sure find a discussion of dangling participles. Participles are formed from verbs but act as adjectives, and as such, they require an appropriate noun to modify. When they fail to meet this requirement, they are said to dangle. Here, I’m going to focus on a specific participle [...]
The placement of adverbs—which modify verbs, adjectives, or other adverbs—can substantially change the meaning of a sentence. You’ve probably run across example sentences illustrating the importance of correctly placing the adverb “only”: Only I drive red cars; no one else drives them. I only drive red cars; I do not park them. I drive only [...]
Recently, I was asked to help an author shorten a paper by 10% to meet the word-count requirements of the target journal. The paper was already quite short and contained little extraneous information. However, by using the techniques illustrated here with example sentences, I accomplished the task without eliminating anything important. Consider the following sentences:
Sentences with two subjects separated by “and” can be ambiguous when the first subject contains a prepositional phrase. Here’s an example I ran across recently in a chemistry paper I was editing: Data processing for reproduction of element maps and calculation of fluorescence counts was performed with the software package. The presence of the “for” [...]
In addition to being an editor, I’m also a knitter, and I occasionally teach knitting and write knitting patterns. When I first started writing patterns, I was surprised by the ways that my students could misinterpret instructions that seemed perfectly clear to me, and I quickly learned to word my instructions as clearly and precisely [...]
Scientific Style and Format: The Manual for Authors Editors, and Publishers (7th ed, pp. 586) recommends that text citations of figures be parenthetical. If your target journal follows this style guide, you’ll want to make a separate pass through your manuscript to check your figure citations and revise if necessary. Let’s look at some before-and-after [...]
