Scientific papers tend to contain lots of abbreviations—acronyms, initialisms,* gene symbols and protein designations, element and isotope symbols, chemical formulas, and so on—and authors sometimes have difficulty choosing the correct indefinite article (“a” or “an”) to use with abbreviations.
Quotes
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:
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Miscues involving prepositional phrases
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:
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Illogical comparisons
This week’s tip? Beware of illogical comparisons. When you use “in contrast with,” “compared with/to,” “like,” or “unlike,” make sure that the items you are comparing fall into the same category. Here’s an example of an illogical comparison:
In contrast to Figure 1, which shows the conventional process, no intermediate ion-pair is formed during the novel process shown in Figure 2.
In this sentence, the word order results in an illogical comparison between “Figure 1” and “intermediate ion-pair.” To revise, make sure that the “in contrast to” phrase is immediately followed by the second of the two items being compared:
In contrast to the conventional process (Fig. 1), the novel process shown in Fig. 2 does not involve formation of an intermediate ion-pair.