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Syntax Usage Writing Tips

How to describe removal of protecting groups

In synthetic chemistry, protecting groups (also sometimes referred to as protective groups) are used to mask reactive functional groups, either to prevent them from being transformed by a given set of reaction conditions or to prevent them from interfering with a desired reaction.

Functional groups are usually described as being protected or deprotected, and protecting groups can be described as being installed, added, or put on and then as being removed or cleaved. (Note that these are not the only options.) Here are some typical examples of standard usage:

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Scientific Editing Syntax Uncategorized Writing Tips

Don’t omit needed words

In a review article I was reading recently to get some background information for an editing job, I encountered a sentence that I couldn’t decipher even after having read it several times. It serves as  a good example of how omitting words can lead readers down the garden path to a misinterpretation, or several possible misinterpretations. Here’s the sentence:

The cytosol contains enzymes that channel reducing equivalents from NADPH to small thiol-containing species and thiol/disulfide oxidoreductase enzymes (e.g., glutathione and thioredoxin) to reverse disulfide formation and other oxidative modifications of proteins.

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Scientific Editing Tools

Podcasts, MOOCs, and other online educational resources for science editors

My postgraduate training was rather narrowly focused on synthetic organic chemistry, but in my 20 years as a science editor, I’ve often been called upon to edit material outside this specific area of expertise. As a result, I’ve learned a lot about, for example, environmental chemistry and materials science simply by frequently editing papers in those fields. However, the relatively recent advent of podcasts, MOOCs (massively open online courses), and webcasts has allowed me to more systematically expand my knowledge of, and keep current in, other areas of interest to me—such as nanotechnology, bioinformatics, biochemistry/chemical biology, cell biology, immunology, virology, and statistics. By familiarizing myself with the basic concepts and standard terminology in these fields, I’ve been able to speed up my editing, ask more-informed questions, and provide more value to my clients.

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Usage Writing Tips

“Concerning” as an adjective

When you submit a paper to a scientific journal,  you want the editor and the referees to focus on the science not the writing, which should transmit your meaning without attracting attention to itself. Correct grammar, punctuation, and spelling are important, of course, but your writing should also sound natural to native speakers.  One way to achieve this is to avoid subtle errors in word usage. One that I frequently encounter in my ESL editing is the use of “concerning” as an adjective:

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Grammar Syntax Usage Writing Tips

“A” or “An” with abbreviations? It depends.

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.

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