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  • Should you use past tense or present tense when citing a study in your introduction?

    Here’s the rule in one line: when you cite a study, the verb that reports it goes in past tense (“Gupta et al. showed…”), and the verb that describes what they found can go in present tense if you want the finding to still sound true today (“…that X is associated with Y”). Same sentence, two verbs, two different jobs — and mixing them up is one of the quietest ways an introduction ends up sounding either overconfident or oddly dated.

    This is Writing Tip 7, and it’s one of the most-flagged issues we see in introduction sections, precisely because both tenses are grammatically fine. Nobody’s spellchecker catches it. It just reads slightly off, and most authors can’t say why.

    The two-verb structure

    Almost every citation sentence in an introduction has two verbs doing different work:

    Gupta et al. (2012) showed that increased soil salinity was associated with reduced yield.

    “Showed” is the reporting verb — it tells the reader an event happened, and that event is safely in the past, so past tense is the natural choice. You can write “shows,” and it isn’t wrong, but it tends to read as affected, like narrating a study as if it’s happening live in front of you. Past tense is the boring, correct default here, and boring is what you want.

    “Was associated” is the finding verb, and this is where you actually have a choice worth making. Write it in past tense and you’re saying: this is what that particular study found, in that particular dataset, at that particular time. Write it in present tense — “is associated with” — and you’re saying something stronger: this isn’t just a historical result, it’s still how the world works.

    That’s the whole trick. The reporting verb almost always stays past. The finding verb is your dial between “this happened once” and “this is true.”

    Why you’d deliberately choose the weaker one

    Here’s the part that surprises people: past tense on the finding verb isn’t a mistake to avoid, it’s a tool. If you’re about to introduce a study that contradicts or updates an older one, putting the older result in past tense does some of the argumentative work for you before you’ve said a single evaluative word.

    “Early work suggested that X caused Y. More recent studies show that X causes Y only under specific conditions.” You haven’t written “however” or “in contrast” anywhere in there, and the reader still feels the shift, because the tense told them which claim is closed and which is current. That’s a genuinely useful piece of grammar to have deliberate control over, not just correct usage of.

    There’s also a stronger move still: drop the reporting verb entirely when you already have a citation doing that job. “Increased soil salinity is associated with reduced yield (Gupta et al., 2012)” reads as more assertive than the version with “showed that” in it, because you’re no longer hedging behind who found it — you’re just stating it, with the source attached as evidence rather than as the subject of the sentence. Use it when you want the claim to carry the sentence, not the study.

    The related rule this isn’t

    One thing this rule doesn’t cover: describing a broad trend in the field rather than one study’s finding — “the contribution of agricultural production to greenhouse gas has long been debated” — which usually wants present perfect, not simple past. That’s a separate call with its own triggers (dates in the sentence push you back to simple past), and it’s covered in Writing Tip 6 if you want it next.

    If it’s easier to see this in action than read it, there’s a short video walkthrough on exactly this — how the verb tense you pick actually changes the meaning of a citation sentence, not just its formality.

    A quick check for your own introduction

    Go through your citation sentences and ask, for each one: is the reporting verb past tense (it almost always should be), and did I choose the finding verb’s tense on purpose, or just copy whatever tense the last sentence happened to be in? That second habit — tense drifting sentence to sentence rather than being chosen — is the one that actually shows up in edited manuscripts more than any single “wrong” tense does.

    It’s a small thing to fix and it’s exactly the kind of small thing a second pair of eyes catches faster than the person who wrote the sentence, because you already know what you meant — a reader doesn’t. If you’d rather have an editor go through the introduction line by line for this and everything else, that’s what Academic English Editing Level 3 is for. There’s also a whole e-book on tense choices through the introduction section, How to Master Verb Tense in the Introduction Section, on Uni-edit’s book site if you want to go deeper than one blog post can.

    And if tense questions like this one are the kind of thing you’d rather have land in your inbox before you’re staring at a deadline, you can sign up for the writing tips — this was one of fifteen, and the rest cover the same kind of quietly-wrong-not-technically-incorrect problem.

    A course on this, if enough people want one

    Tips like this one are the raw material for Academic Writing Essentials, a short course we are thinking about building. It does not exist yet. If it would be useful, add your name and tell us what it should cover.

    We will email you once, when it opens. Nothing else.

    Join the waitlist

  • What’s Wrong With ‘The Present Study’?

    Nothing. “The present study” is grammatically fine. The problem is what happens when it shows up nine times in one results section: it starts costing your reader effort for no reason, and in an abstract it eats words you don’t have to spare. The fix is simple enough to repeat in the hallway: swap “the present study” for “we” when you can, and “this study” when one clean noun phrase will do.

    This is Writing Tip 13, and it’s one of the ones that comes up again and again in edited manuscripts — not because anyone was taught to write it, but because it’s the safe, careful phrase you reach for when you’re not sure “we” is allowed.

    Why “the present study” is the wrong kind of correct

    Two things go wrong when you lean on it too hard.

    The first is plain repetition. If every paragraph in your discussion opens with “the present study found” or “the present study suggests,” the reader stops reading the phrase and starts skimming past it — which means they might skim past the sentence too. Worse, if you’re also citing other work, a page full of identical noun phrases makes it genuinely harder to tell which “study” you mean at any given moment. The repetition that was meant to sound careful ends up reading as vague.

    The second is subtler, and it has a name: markedness. Common words take less mental effort to process than uncommon ones, even when both are correct. “The present study” is a marked phrase — three words doing the job “we” or “this study” could do in one. It doesn’t sound wrong. It sounds like it’s trying, and reviewers notice when prose is trying.

    In an abstract, where every journal enforces a hard word limit, that difference is not cosmetic. “The present study demonstrates” versus “we show” is three words you could have spent on your actual finding.

    The two fixes, and when each one works

    First person, when you want to be direct. “We found that female gender predicted lower continuation rates” reads as ordinary, confident academic English — because it is. If you want to flag that you’re talking about your own current results rather than someone else’s, add “here”: “Our results here demonstrate…” And when you’re contrasting your findings with earlier work, “previous” or “past” does the same job for the other side: “Previous studies reported X; here, we found Y.”

    “This study,” when you want to stay in third person. It’s interchangeable with “the present study” and shorter: “This study investigated individual and environmental factors” instead of “The present study investigated…” Same meaning, one fewer marked word.

    One real catch: don’t reach for “this study” when you’re discussing more than one study in the same breath. “This study” only works if there’s exactly one obvious referent nearby. If your paragraph mentions your own work alongside two prior papers, “this study” becomes ambiguous exactly where you needed clarity — and “the present study,” clunky as it is, at least disambiguates. Know the exception before you apply the rule.

    Try it on your own draft

    Search your manuscript for “the present study.” Every hit is a decision point: if it’s competing with other studies in the same sentence, keep it. Everywhere else, try “we” first, then “this study” if you need the distance of third person. Read the sentence aloud afterwards — if it sounds like something you’d actually say to a labmate, you’ve made the right call.

    Choosing the least effortful correct word is a general skill, not just a fix for one phrase — there’s a video on choosing the best word or phrase in your writing if you want the wider version of this same judgement call. It also gets its own chapter — on mastering similar words in your research paper — in Uni-edit’s book on fixing academic English.

    If this kind of line-by-line rewording is the part you’d rather hand off, that’s exactly what Level 3 editing does — a paper-wide pass for phrasing, repetition and structure, not just grammar.

    And if you’d rather have tips like this land in your inbox before you hit the phrase in your own draft, you can sign up for our writing and publication emails.

    A course on this, if enough people want one

    Tips like this one are the raw material for Academic Writing Essentials, a short course we are thinking about building. It does not exist yet. If it would be useful, add your name and tell us what it should cover.

    We will email you once, when it opens. Nothing else.

    Join the waitlist

  • What Does \”Significant\” Actually Mean in a Research Paper?

    “Significant” means two different things in a research paper, and most of the confusion in a Results section comes down to which one you meant. Statistically, it means a result cleared a threshold — usually p<0.05 — against a null hypothesis. Everyday, it just means “important” or “worth mentioning.” English lets you use the same word for both. Your reader can’t always tell which one you’re using, and that’s the actual problem, not the word itself.

    Here’s the line worth remembering: if a reviewer can’t tell whether “significant” means p<0.05 or just “notable,” that’s a sentence problem, not a results problem. You already have the finding. You just haven’t said which kind of significant it is.

    The statistical meaning

    In statistics, “significant” is a technical claim: the quantitative difference between two groups was large enough to satisfy the criteria of the test you ran. It needs a comparison, a test, and a threshold behind it. A clean example:

    “There was a statistically significant difference between the experiment and control groups (P<0.05), leading us to reject our null hypothesis.”

    Notice the sentence does three jobs at once: it names the comparison (experiment vs. control), it gives the threshold (P<0.05), and it says what that means for the hypothesis. That’s the version of “significant” that should never appear without a number attached, even if the number lives in a table rather than the sentence itself.

    The everyday meaning

    Outside your stats, “significant” just means important or relevant — no p-value required. “Iron ore is significant to Australia’s economy” isn’t a claim about a hypothesis test; it’s a claim about how much iron ore matters. Research findings can be “significant” to a policy debate the same way, purely on relevance, with no comparison group in sight.

    Both uses are correct English. The trouble starts when a paper switches between them without telling the reader it’s switching.

    Where it actually goes wrong

    Picture a Discussion section that reports a statistically significant result in paragraph one, then writes “these are significant findings for the field” in paragraph three. A careful reviewer stops and asks: significant how? Statistically, like before — or just important, in the ordinary sense? If you mean the second one, say “important” or “notable” instead and save “significant” for the number. That single substitution removes the ambiguity for free.

    There’s a second trap the tip doesn’t cover, and it’s the one that actually gets papers into trouble: statistically significant is not the same as actually significant. With a large enough sample, even a trivial, meaningless difference will clear P<0.05 — the test only tells you the difference probably isn’t zero, not that it’s big enough to matter. A 0.3% change in outcome across ten thousand participants can be “significant” and practically irrelevant at the same time. If your effect size is small, say so, and don’t let the p-value do the persuading on its own. Reviewers who work with statistics every day will notice if you do.

    The fix, in one habit

    Pair “significant” with “statistically” whenever you mean the test, every time, even when it feels repetitive by the fifth mention. Everywhere else, reach for “substantial,” “considerable,” or “notable” instead of bare “significant.” It costs you nothing and it means nobody has to guess which meaning you intended.

    This is the kind of thing that’s easier to hear than read — Uni-edit’s writing tip on “significant” has two short videos walking through both meanings with more examples, on the University English Hub channel.

    Part 2 goes further into the common mistakes writers make once they’ve got the basic split — worth five more minutes if this one raises questions of its own.

    This is one word out of thousands in your manuscript, and it’s rarely the only one doing double duty. If you want the whole vocabulary checked for exactly this kind of ambiguity — words that are correct on their own but unclear in context — that’s what a full publication-quality edit is built to catch, alongside the sentence-level and structural issues a p-value can’t fix. If you’d rather work through the logic yourself first, the chapter “How to Master Similar Words in Your Research Paper” in How to Fix Your Academic English and Publish Your Research Faster covers this same kind of near-miss vocabulary in more depth.

    And if you’d like tips like this one sent to you as you write, rather than found when you need them, you can subscribe to Uni-edit’s writing and publication emails.

    A course on this, if enough people want one

    Tips like this one are the raw material for Academic Writing Essentials, a short course we are thinking about building. It does not exist yet. If it would be useful, add your name and tell us what it should cover.

    We will email you once, when it opens. Nothing else.

    Join the waitlist

  • How to Use Semicolons in a List (When Commas Alone Won’t Work)

    If a list of things already has commas inside each item, plain commas between the items stop working — the reader can’t tell where one item ends and the next begins. The fix is to swap the commas between items for semicolons instead. Think of a semicolon here as just a bigger comma: same job, does it more visibly.

    The rule you can actually repeat

    Here’s the one-liner: if any item in your list already contains a comma, upgrade every comma between the items to a semicolon. That’s it. You’re not adding punctuation for style — you’re removing an ambiguity that was already there.

    This comes up constantly in academic writing, because academic lists are rarely single words. They’re names with titles, places with countries, results with their own numbers attached — and every one of those has an internal comma waiting to collide with the commas holding the list together.

    The classic case: a list of people with titles

    Say you’re listing your thesis committee. Written with commas only, it reads like this:

    We had four professors on our committee: Peter Wursthorn, Professor of Mathematics, Ronald Pepin, Professor of English, Cynthia Greenblatt, Professor of Education, and Nada Light, Professor of Nursing.

    Count the commas and you’ll see the problem — there’s no visual difference between “the comma that separates a name from a title” and “the comma that separates one person from the next.” A reader seeing this cold could plausibly parse “Ronald Pepin” and “Professor of English” as two separate committee members. Semicolons fix it instantly:

    We had four professors on our committee: Peter Wursthorn, Professor of Mathematics; Ronald Pepin, Professor of English; Cynthia Greenblatt, Professor of Education; and Nada Light, Professor of Nursing.

    Now the semicolons mark the real boundaries, and the commas are free to do their smaller job inside each item.

    The version that shows up in methods sections

    The same collision happens with data, and it’s an even easier one to miss because the numbers look fine on their own:

    The participants in the first group scored 70 points, the second, 60, and the third, 40.

    Read that sentence at normal speed and you’ll stumble somewhere around “the second, 60.” Semicolons make the three results sit apart cleanly:

    The participants in the first group scored 70 points; the second, 60; and the third, 40.

    And you’ll see this same pattern anywhere you list sample sites or affiliations — “Kaohsiung, Taiwan, Osaka, Japan, and Busan, South Korea” is exactly the same problem in disguise, because “Taiwan” and “Osaka” now sit next to each other with nothing marking the join. Semicolons after each country name solve it the same way: “Kaohsiung, Taiwan; Osaka, Japan; and Busan, South Korea.”

    Where it still catches people out

    The rule is simple, but people misapply it in the opposite direction too — sprinkling semicolons into a plain list that never needed them, because “semicolons sound more academic.” They don’t. A list of single words or short phrases (“apples, pears, and bananas”) never needs a semicolon, no matter how formal the paper is. The semicolon only earns its place once a comma is already doing a smaller job inside one of the items. If nothing in the list has an internal comma, leave it alone.

    If it’s easier to see this in motion than read it, University English Hub has a short video walking through the same two examples — worth two minutes if you want the rule to stick before your next revision pass.

    This is one of the original Uni-edit writing tips — if punctuation like this is the kind of thing you’d rather a second pair of eyes just caught, it’s exactly what Level 3 editing is built to fix, alongside grammar and basic phrasing, before the sentence-level stuff ever gets in front of a reviewer.

    And if you want the next one of these before it turns into a habit you have to unlearn, Uni-edit’s writing-tips list sends them out one at a time — get our writing and publication emails here.

    A course on this, if enough people want one

    Tips like this one are the raw material for Academic Writing Essentials, a short course we are thinking about building. It does not exist yet. If it would be useful, add your name and tell us what it should cover.

    We will email you once, when it opens. Nothing else.

    Join the waitlist

  • How to Reduce Wordiness in a Research Paper (Without Losing Meaning)

    If a journal caps your abstract at 250 words and yours is running at 290, you don’t need to say less. You need to say the same thing in fewer words. That’s the whole skill, and it’s more mechanical than it sounds: most wordiness comes from a handful of repeatable habits, and once you can spot them, cutting a sentence by 20% takes seconds.

    Here’s the one-line version, worth repeating to a labmate: if you can delete a word and the sentence still means exactly the same thing, delete it. Not “if it sounds better” — if the meaning survives. That test is stricter than it looks, and it’s the difference between trimming and rewriting.

    The three places wordiness actually hides

    You’ve probably done all three of these without noticing, because each one feels like normal academic phrasing while you’re typing it.

    1. “There is/are … that” constructions

    This pattern adds a subject and a verb before the sentence has said anything yet.

    Before: “There are several studies that suggest a link between sleep deprivation and impaired glucose tolerance.”
    After: “Several studies suggest a link between sleep deprivation and impaired glucose tolerance.”

    Three words gone, nothing lost. “There are … that” almost never survives contact with this test, because “there are” isn’t doing any work — the real subject is sitting three words later, waiting.

    2. Words that repeat a meaning already in the sentence

    This one is sneakier, because each word looks like it’s adding precision when it’s actually adding nothing.

    • “Possibly could” — “could” already carries the uncertainty. Cut “possibly.”
    • “About 15–20 participants” — a range already means “about.” Cut “about.”
    • “Very critical” — “critical” is already at the top of the scale. “Very” doesn’t push it further; it just sits there.

    The test again: does removing the word change what the sentence claims? If a reviewer would understand the same thing either way, it’s redundant, not emphatic.

    3. Wordy phrases standing in for a single conjunction

    “Due to the fact that” and “based on the fact that” are two of the most common phrases we see across the papers that come through Uni-edit’s editing desk, almost always where “because” or “since” would do the job in one word instead of four or five.

    Before: “Due to the fact that sample sizes were small, statistical power was limited.”
    After: “Because sample sizes were small, statistical power was limited.”

    Same claim, same hedge, four fewer words — and it reads like something a person would actually say, which is worth more than it sounds.

    Try it: cut this sentence by four words

    Here’s the practice sentence Uni-edit’s own writing tip opens with. Twenty-one words, and it’s carrying at least four that aren’t doing anything:

    “There are several reports that possibly suggest that a slight reduction in sugar intake could possibly extend one’s lifespan by about 1-3 years.”

    Run all three checks on it before you scroll past this line. Then compare:

    “Several reports suggest that a slight reduction in sugar intake could extend one’s lifespan by 1-3 years.”

    “There are” and its trailing “that” are gone (rule 1). Both “possibly”s are gone, because “suggest” and “could” already hedge the claim (rule 2). “About” is gone, because “1-3 years” is already a range (rule 2 again). Same sentence, same caveats, five words lighter — one more than the original challenge asks for, which is exactly the point: once you can see the pattern, you tend to overshoot the target rather than miss it.

    Why this matters more than it seems to

    Word limits aren’t a formatting nuisance — they’re a proxy for how well you can prioritise your own argument. An abstract that’s 40 words over isn’t usually saying 40 words more; it’s saying the same thing with 40 words of static in it. A reviewer notices the static before they notice the finding.

    You can read the full Writing Tip 9: Reducing Wordiness for the source version of these three rules. And if you’re staring at a manuscript that’s over the limit and can’t tell anymore which words are load-bearing and which are static — that’s exactly the judgement call a second pair of eyes is good for, which is what Level 3 editing does alongside the grammar pass.

    If you’d rather have one of these in your inbox every so often instead of hunting for them, you can subscribe to our writing tips.

    A course on this, if enough people want one

    Tips like this one are the raw material for Academic Writing Essentials, a short course we are thinking about building. It does not exist yet. If it would be useful, add your name and tell us what it should cover.

    We will email you once, when it opens. Nothing else.

    Join the waitlist

  • Present perfect or past tense in your introduction? Here’s the test

    Here’s the test: if you can name the researcher, use past tense. If you’re describing what “researchers” in general have been finding for years, use present perfect. “The contribution of agricultural production to greenhouse gas has long been debated” — not “was long debated.” Nobody debated it once and stopped; the debate is still running, and present perfect is the tense that says so.

    This is Writing Tip 6, and it trips people up for a specific reason: both tenses are grammatically correct in almost every sentence you’d write. Nothing underlines red. The sentence just quietly says something you didn’t mean — either that a live debate is over, or that a single study is somehow still ongoing.

    Named study, or general trend?

    The whole rule turns on one question: are you talking about a specific, identifiable study, or an unnamed body of work?

    When a study is specific — you can point to who did it and often when — simple past is what you want, and adding a date makes it non-negotiable: “Smith et al. conducted a two-year field experiment in 2009 and 2010 in rice paddies…” You wouldn’t write “have conducted” there. The experiment has an end date. It’s finished, it’s specific, and the sentence should sound finished too.

    When you’re summarising a field rather than citing one paper, present perfect is usually the better fit, because the thing you’re describing hasn’t stopped: “The contribution of agricultural production to greenhouse gas has long been debated.” No named author, no end date — the debate is still active, present perfect says so, and switching this one to simple past would quietly close a question that’s still open.

    The underlying logic is about specificity, not time. “Some researchers” isn’t specific. “Bouwman et al.” is. Once you can name the who, you’ve usually earned the right to name the when — and once there’s a when in the sentence, past tense is doing the honest job.

    The exception: negative sentences

    There’s one place present perfect wins even without a broad trend behind it: sentences that say something hasn’t happened yet. “Whether reducing potato crops is a viable strategy for reducing emissions has not yet been determined” reads naturally in present perfect and slightly oddly in simple past (“was not determined” sounds like someone tried and gave up, rather than that the question is still open). If your sentence is a gap in the literature rather than a finding in it, present perfect is usually the tense doing that gap justice.

    Not the same call as Tip 7

    It’s easy to mix this up with a different, related tense decision: inside a single citation sentence, whether the verb reporting a finding (“showed”) should be followed by a finding verb in past or present tense (“was associated” vs “is associated”). That’s a separate rule with its own logic, and it’s covered in the companion post on citing a specific study if you want it next. This one is about naming a study versus describing a field; that one is about two verbs in the same sentence doing different jobs.

    There’s a short video on this too, on how the tense you pick changes the mood of the sentence, not just its grammar, if that’s an easier way in than reading it worked through.

    A quick check for your own draft

    Find every sentence in your introduction that starts with something like “researchers have” or “it has been shown” and ask: could I name who? If yes, and especially if there’s a date nearby, switch to past tense. If the honest answer is “several people, over years, and it’s still going,” leave it in present perfect. That one question resolves most of the cases that otherwise get fixed by guesswork.

    It’s a small distinction, but it’s exactly the kind a second pair of eyes catches faster than the person who wrote the sentence — you know which sense you meant, a reviewer doesn’t. If you’d rather have someone go through the introduction for this and everything else around it, that’s what Academic English Editing Level 3 is for. There’s also a full chapter on it, How to Master Verb Tense in the Introduction Section, in Uni-edit’s book on fixing your academic English, if you want the longer version.

    And if you’d rather these land in your inbox before the deadline than get found mid-panic, you can sign up for the writing tips — this is one of fifteen, and the rest cover the same kind of quietly-wrong-not-technically-incorrect problem.

    A course on this, if enough people want one

    Tips like this one are the raw material for Academic Writing Essentials, a short course we are thinking about building. It does not exist yet. If it would be useful, add your name and tell us what it should cover.

    We will email you once, when it opens. Nothing else.

    Join the waitlist

  • What Is Parallel Structure? The One-Line Test for Lists and Comparisons

    Parallel structure means every item in a list, and every side of a comparison, is built from the same grammatical part: noun with noun, verb with verb, phrase with phrase. Break that match and a sentence doesn’t usually become wrong exactly — it just goes lopsided, and a reader feels the wobble before they can say why.

    Here’s the classic broken version: “problems for both the winners and for those who lose.” One side is a noun (“the winners”), the other is a clause (“those who lose”). Match the parts and it snaps into place: “problems for both winners and losers.” Same meaning, half the effort to read.

    The one-line test: read it as a list

    Here’s the rule you can actually repeat to a labmate: find the shared stem, then check that every branch off it is the same part of speech. Take this sentence:

    Wrong: “Mike learned to read poems critically and he appreciated good prose.”

    The stem is “Mike learned to…” Plug in the first branch and it works: “Mike learned to read poems critically.” Plug in the second branch and it doesn’t — “Mike learned to he appreciated good prose” is nonsense, because the second half quietly switched from an infinitive to a full clause. Fix it by making both branches infinitives:

    Right: “Mike learned to read poems critically and to appreciate good prose.”

    That’s the whole test. You don’t need to name the parts of speech out loud — you just need to notice when plugging a branch back into the stem stops sounding like a sentence.

    Where it hides in an aims sentence

    This is the version we see constantly in the last line of an introduction, where a paper states its objectives:

    Wrong: “The aim of this study was to characterize the mutation and evaluating its downstream effects.”

    Run the test: the stem is “The aim … was to…” — “to characterize the mutation” plugs in fine, “to evaluating its downstream effects” doesn’t, because it drifted from infinitive to gerund halfway through. One word fixes it:

    Right: “The aim of this study was to characterize the mutation and evaluate its downstream effects.”

    It’s an easy slip to make, because both halves sound fine read alone — the mismatch only shows up once you say them against the shared “to.”

    The version that hides in a comparison

    Parallelism isn’t only about lists joined by “and” — it governs comparisons too, and this one is sneakier because the sentence still parses, it just compares two different kinds of thing:

    Wrong: “Our results were more consistent than the control group.”

    Read literally, that compares “our results” to “the control group” — a set of numbers against a group of people. What the writer means is a comparison between two sets of results:

    Right: “Our results were more consistent than those of the control group.”

    “Those of” is doing real work there — it’s what keeps both sides of “than” the same kind of thing. Reviewers rarely flag this explicitly, but it’s exactly the sort of line that makes a paragraph feel slightly harder to trust than it should, even when every fact in it is solid.

    Why it’s worth catching before submission

    None of these errors change what the data show. What they change is how much work a reader has to do to get there — and a reviewer who’s re-reading your aims sentence to figure out what you meant is a reviewer who’s no longer thinking about your results. Parallel structure is one of those things that costs nothing to fix and quietly buys back a reviewer’s patience.

    The original Writing Tip 3 on the main site continues into the trickier cases this post didn’t have room for — repeating “the” correctly across a list, and getting “both…and” and “not only…but also” to line up — if you want the fuller reference.

    If this is the kind of sentence-level snag you’d rather someone else caught before a journal sees it, that’s the level our editing service works at — line by line, alongside grammar, phrasing and structure generally.

    And if you’d rather have one of these land in your inbox before it lands in your draft, our writing and publication emails send out one point like this at a time.

    A course on this, if enough people want one

    Tips like this one are the raw material for Academic Writing Essentials, a short course we are thinking about building. It does not exist yet. If it would be useful, add your name and tell us what it should cover.

    We will email you once, when it opens. Nothing else.

    Join the waitlist

  • On the Other Hand vs. Besides: What’s the Difference?

    “On the other hand” means you’re still weighing two sides. “Besides” means you’ve already decided, and you’re just piling on extra reasons. That’s the whole difference, and it’s worth learning because mixing them up doesn’t just sound a bit off — it can make your argument read as one-sided when you didn’t mean it to.

    Both phrases show up constantly in discussion and introduction sections, usually right where a paper is comparing two methods, two materials, or two explanations. Here’s how to tell them apart, with real examples from edited papers.

    What “on the other hand” actually signals

    “On the other hand” tells the reader you’re genuinely deliberating — laying out a real counterpoint before you’ve reached a conclusion. That’s why the full structure “on one hand… on the other hand…” turns up so often: it’s two live options, side by side.

    A sentence we edited on carbon nanotubes does this cleanly: it lists the advantages of metallic carbon nanotubes, then adds, “On the other hand, their fabrication is a challenging and time-consuming process…” At that point in the paragraph, the author hasn’t picked a side yet. The reader is still being shown both pans of the scale.

    What “besides” actually signals

    “Besides” does something different. It introduces an extra idea after the decision has already been made — the reasoning that follows isn’t weighed, it’s just stacked on top of a conclusion you’ve already reached.

    In the same paper, once the authors had ruled out the nanotubes, they wrote: “Besides, the speed of existing technology is suitable for our purposes.” Notice the shift — this isn’t a competing consideration anymore. It’s a justification for a choice that’s already final.

    That’s exactly why “besides” can backfire in academic writing. Because it arrives after the decision, it can read as dismissive, or as reaching for whatever supports a conclusion you’d already settled on — which is the opposite of how you want a methods justification to sound. Careful writers use it sparingly for this reason: stacking “extra” reasons on top of a decision tends to dilute the argument rather than strengthen it, because it suggests the first reason wasn’t quite enough on its own.

    If what you actually want is one more piece of solid evidence — not a rationalisation — reach for “moreover” or “in addition” instead. Both add support without implying you’re backfilling a decision already made.

    There’s a video that goes further into this exact distinction, “in addition” versus “besides,” if you’d rather watch it explained than read it:

    The one-line test

    Before you type either phrase, ask yourself: am I still deciding, or have I already decided and I’m just adding support? Still deciding → “on the other hand.” Already decided → “besides” — or, better, “moreover” or “in addition.” That question takes about two seconds and it’s the whole rule.

    This is expanded from Writing Tip 10 on our site, which is worth bookmarking if you want the short version to check against later. And if transition words like these are a recurring snag for you rather than an occasional one, Chapter 3 of How to Fix Your Academic English and Publish Your Research Faster is built entirely around them, with more before-and-after examples than fit in a blog post.

    Word choices like this are also exactly what a second pair of eyes catches during editing — a “besides” that’s quietly undermining your argument doesn’t usually flag itself. If you’d rather have someone else check this kind of thing across a full manuscript, that’s what our Level 3 editing are for.

    And if you’d rather get one distinction like this in your inbox every so often instead of hunting for them, you can subscribe to our writing and publication emails.

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  • Should You Nominate Your Own Peer Reviewers When You Submit?

    A lot of submission systems have a field for “suggested reviewers,” and a lot of authors skip straight past it because it looks optional and slightly awkward — like you’re picking your own examiner. Some journals require it outright. Either way, it’s worth filling in properly, because it’s one of the only points in the entire peer-review process where you get any say over who reads your paper.

    Here’s the one-line version, and the one worth repeating to a labmate who’s about to skip the box: a generalist editor usually knows less about your specific subfield than you do, so naming a genuinely qualified reviewer is helping them, not gaming the system.

    Why the box exists

    Journal editors, especially at broad-scope or generalist journals, cover far more ground than any one person can be an expert in. An editor handling submissions across an entire subdiscipline is not going to know, off the top of their head, who the three best people in the world are to assess your specific method. You do. That’s the entire logic behind the request — it isn’t the journal outsourcing its judgment to you, it’s the journal asking the person with the most specialist knowledge in the room where to look.

    It’s also, as Writing Tip 12 points out, not the free pass it sounds like. Recommendations are non-binding on both sides: editors regularly ignore suggested names entirely, and nominated reviewers are just as free to decline. Nobody is quietly stacking their own review panel here — you’re offering a shortlist, not choosing a jury.

    How to build a list worth submitting

    The useful version of this list takes fifteen minutes, not thirty seconds. A few things worth getting right:

    • Aim for 7–10 names whose own published work sits close to yours — not adjacent, close. Contacting them beforehand is fine but not required.
    • Rule out anyone with a conflict of interest before you rule anyone in: current colleagues, anyone at your institution, anyone with a financial stake in the outcome.
    • Consider people you’ve cited. They already know the area cold, and they have their own reason to want your representation of the field to be accurate.
    • Mix career stages. Early-career researchers are more likely to accept a review request and to give it real time, precisely because they haven’t yet been buried under a decade of them.
    • Look for range, not agreement. A list that’s all one lab’s collaborators reads as narrow; a mix of institutions and countries reads as a paper confident enough to survive genuine scrutiny.

    For each name, give a one-line reason they’re a good fit and their institutional email and affiliation — most submission forms ask for exactly this, and a name with no justification attached is easy for an editor to skip past.

    If you’re unsure what actually makes someone a strong reviewer rather than just a plausible name, University English Hub’s video on how people become peer reviewers is a useful five minutes — it covers the qualifications editors actually look for, which is the same bar your nominees need to clear.

    Find your journal’s actual policy — don’t guess

    What we won’t do here is tell you how many reviewers to suggest, whether it’s mandatory, or whether your target journal lets you also name reviewers you’d prefer to avoid — because that genuinely varies by journal and publisher, and the rules change. The only reliable source is the journal’s own current instructions:

    1. The “Instructions for Authors” / “Guide for Authors” page — search that page specifically for “suggest reviewers” or “recommend reviewers,” since it’s often a subsection buried inside a longer submission-checklist page rather than its own heading.
    2. The submission portal itself, once you start the upload. Many systems only reveal the suggested-reviewer fields — and any limits on how many names, or whether excluded reviewers are allowed — at that stage, not on the public instructions page.

    If either is unclear, the editorial office will answer a direct email faster than you’d expect. It’s a normal question, not an unusual one.

    If you want the wider context — why peer review works the way it does, and why editors still lean on it despite its flaws — University English Hub’s short history of peer review is worth the four minutes; it’s the background that makes the suggested-reviewers box make sense as more than paperwork.

    What happens after they say yes

    A well-chosen reviewer list tends to produce sharper, more specific comments — which is good for the paper, but it does mean you’ll have real, detailed points to answer rather than a generic “revise and resubmit.” Before any of this, though, the manuscript itself needs to be clean enough that a reviewer’s first read is about the science, not the English — that’s the gap Level 3 editing closes before submission. And once the reports do come back, drafting a point-by-point reply that reads as collaborative rather than defensive is its own skill; that’s what response-to-reviewers editing is for, if you’d rather not write it entirely alone.

    We go through the whole submission checklist, including how editors actually use a suggested-reviewer list, in Chapter 8, “What Must You Know About Journal Peer Reviewers?” of our book on fixing your academic English and publishing faster.

    And if this is the kind of small, easy-to-miss submission detail you’d rather have land in your inbox before you’re rushing a deadline, this was one of fifteen writing tips — get our writing and publication emails here.

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  • How to Use Hyphens Correctly in Academic Writing

    A hyphen joins two or more words that are working together as a single description in front of a noun — “a well-designed study” — and you drop it the moment those same words land after the noun: “the study was well designed.” That one rule fixes most of the hyphen mistakes we see in manuscripts.

    It sounds small. It isn’t. Reviewers read hyphenation as a proxy for care, and in a few cases a missing or misplaced hyphen genuinely changes what the sentence says. Here’s the rule, the one exception that catches almost everyone, and a trap that’s specific to methods sections.

    The rule: hyphenate before the noun, not after

    When two or more words act as a single adjective sitting in front of a noun, hyphenate them so the reader parses them as one unit:

    • a double-blind trial
    • a case-control study
    • a long-term follow-up
    • a state-of-the-art assay

    Move the same description after the noun it modifies, and the hyphen usually comes out: “the trial was double blind,” “the follow-up was long term.” The words are no longer standing in front of a noun as a single unit, so there’s nothing left to join.

    The exception almost everyone trips on: -ly adverbs

    If the first word is an adverb ending in -ly, never hyphenate it, even when it’s sitting right before the noun it modifies:

    Wrong: “the randomly-selected participants,” “a highly-cited paper.”
    Right: “the randomly selected participants,” “a highly cited paper.”

    The logic: an -ly adverb can only modify the word right next to it, so there’s no ambiguity for the hyphen to resolve — it’s only doing decorative work, and academic style guides ask you to leave it out. This is the single most common hyphen error we correct in edited manuscripts, usually because it looks tidier with the hyphen in. It isn’t.

    The trap that’s specific to methods sections

    A hyphen on a re- verb can change what actually happened in your experiment. Compare:

    “We recreated the original conditions” (we had a nice afternoon reproducing them, informally) versus “We re-created the original conditions” (we built them again, precisely, as a controlled step in the protocol).

    Same pattern with re-form vs. reform, re-sign vs. resign, re-cover vs. recover. Whenever a re- prefix could plausibly be read two ways, the hyphen is what tells the reader which one you mean — this is one of the few places a hyphen carries real information rather than just tidying up a compound adjective.

    The quick test

    Before a noun, ask: are these words only meaningful together, as one description? If yes, hyphenate — unless the first word ends in -ly, in which case, don’t. After the noun, the hyphen almost always comes off. That’s the rule in one line, and it’s worth having in your head the next time you type “well established” in front of a noun.

    Writing Tip 2 on the main site walks through a few more cases — suspended hyphens in a series (“third- and fourth-grade teachers”), hyphenating spelled-out numbers, and prefixes before capitalized words — if you want the fuller reference.

    Watch it in three minutes

    If it’s easier to see worked through than read, this video covers the three main uses of the hyphen in academic English with more examples than fit here:

    There’s also a companion video specifically on hyphens with compound adjectives, and how getting the hyphen wrong changes the meaning of the sentence, if that’s the part you keep second-guessing.

    The full punctuation chapter — hyphens, dashes, commas, and the rest — is written out in Chapter 6 of our book, How to Fix Your Academic English and Publish Your Research Faster, if you’d rather have the whole reference in one place instead of hunting through style guides mid-draft.

    What we actually catch

    In practice, hyphen slips rarely travel alone — they tend to show up alongside article errors, tense drift across a methods section, and the kind of phrasing that’s clear to the writer but not to a reviewer three time zones away. That’s the level of detail our editing service is built to catch, line by line, before a journal ever sees it.

    If you’d rather have small, fixable things like this land in your inbox before they land in your draft, our writing and publication emails cover one point like this at a time.

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  • When Do You Need to Define an Acronym in a Research Paper?

    Here’s the test: if you’ll only use the term once, don’t turn it into an acronym at all — just write it out. If you’ll use it three times or more, define it the first time you write it, unless it’s already more familiar to your reader than the full phrase — nobody needs “deoxyribonucleic acid” spelled out before you write DNA. That’s the whole rule, and most acronym problems in edited manuscripts come from skipping the first half of it.

    This is Writing Tip 15, and it comes up constantly for a simple reason: authors reach for an acronym the moment a term feels long, without asking whether they’re actually going to use it enough to earn its keep.

    Three questions before you coin an acronym

    Is it already common knowledge? DNA, RNA, PCR, MRI — these are more recognisable than the phrases they stand for, so defining them wastes a reader’s time rather than saving it. The same goes for any abbreviation your target journal already lists in a house style guide, or that five or more recently published papers in your field use without definition. If your field already treats it as a word, treat it as a word.

    Will you use it again? If a term appears exactly once in the whole manuscript, an acronym adds nothing — the reader has to hold a definition in memory for a payoff that never comes. Write “the anterior cruciate ligament” once and move on; don’t manufacture “ACL” for a single mention.

    Will it actually help? Beyond three or four uses, an acronym earns its place: it shortens the sentence, and it makes your paper easier to search and skim. That’s the case for defining it clearly on first use — full term, then the acronym in parentheses — and then using the acronym consistently for the rest of the paper. Don’t switch back to the full term later “for clarity”; that’s usually what causes the confusion it’s trying to avoid.

    The abstract is read on its own — define acronyms there too

    This is the part authors miss most often. Your abstract doesn’t just sit at the front of your paper — it gets pulled out and read completely alone, in PubMed listings, Google Scholar snippets, conference programmes, and by reviewers deciding whether to read further. If you define an acronym in your introduction but use it undefined in your abstract, the abstract fails on its own terms, even though the full paper is fine.

    The practical fix: treat the abstract as a separate document for this one purpose. If an acronym appears in it, define it there on first use — even if you also define it again, properly, when the term reappears in the introduction. Two definitions of the same acronym in one paper isn’t redundant; it’s the abstract and the body doing their separate jobs.

    Checking what your target journal actually wants

    Some journals keep an approved list of abbreviations you can use without definition — often buried in the “Instructions for Authors” or a style guide PDF, not the submission portal itself. Others say nothing at all and default to house style, meaning you’re working from field convention rather than a written rule. Either way, the answer isn’t something a general guide like this one can promise you, because it changes by journal and gets updated without much notice. Open your target journal’s own author guidelines and search for “abbreviation” or “acronym” before you finalise your terminology — that ten minutes will tell you more than any rule of thumb, including this one.

    There’s a short video on when to define acronyms in academic writing if you’d rather watch this than read it, and it also gets its own chapter — on mastering acronyms in academic English writing — in Uni-edit’s book on fixing academic English.

    If you’re not sure whether your own acronyms pass this test — or your abstract and body text disagree with each other — that’s exactly the kind of consistency check a full Level 3 edit catches, alongside grammar, structure and phrasing.

    And if you’d rather have tips like this land in your inbox before you hit the problem in your own draft, you can sign up for our writing and publication emails.

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  • Do You Have a Conflict of Interest? How to Tell, and What to Write

    A conflict of interest isn’t proof you did something wrong. It’s anything that could make a reasonable reader wonder whether your results were shaped by something other than the data — funding, employment, a patent, a personal relationship. The rule of thumb worth repeating to a labmate: if you’d feel awkward explaining it to a reviewer, declare it. Declaring it costs you a sentence. Not declaring it, and having someone else spot it later, costs a lot more.

    What actually counts as a conflict of interest

    The clearest definition we’ve seen, and the one we use in Writing Tip 8, is this: a conflict of interest exists when the motivation of one of your roles infringes on the duties of another. A doctor who receives funding from a pharmaceutical company and then studies that company’s drug has two roles pulling in the same direction — clinician and paid consultant — and readers need to know that before they weigh the conclusions.

    In practice, the categories that come up again and again in the papers we edit are:

    • Funding. A grant, consultancy fee, or in-kind support from a company whose product or interests the paper touches on.
    • Employment. Yours, or a close family member’s, at an organisation with a stake in the result.
    • Intellectual property. A patent or pending patent connected to the method or material you’re reporting on.
    • Roles that overlap. Sitting on an editorial board, advisory panel, or review committee connected to the submission.
    • Personal relationships. A close collaborator, former student, or family member among the authors or reviewers.

    None of these mean the research is compromised. They mean a reader deserves the chance to judge that for themselves — which is the entire point of the disclosure. As the tip puts it, a conflict of interest is “the potential for misconduct: a place where extra transparency can help build trust.”

    The test: would it look odd if it came out later?

    Researchers usually don’t struggle with the obvious cases — nobody forgets to mention that a pharmaceutical company funded a drug trial. Where it gets murky is the smaller stuff: a free sample from the manufacturer, a co-author who reviewed your grant application last year, a spouse who works for a competing lab. The test that cuts through this is simple: imagine a peer reviewer finding out about it independently, after the paper is published. If that would look bad, or even just surprising, it belongs in the disclosure — not because you did anything wrong, but because you didn’t get to decide that on the reader’s behalf.

    This is also why editors and reviewers themselves have to manage conflicts of interest, not just authors. If you want to see how a journal’s peer-review process handles this from the other side, it’s worth watching alongside this post.

    Find your journal’s actual policy — don’t guess

    Here’s where we won’t tell you what to write, because it genuinely depends on where you’re submitting. Disclosure requirements vary by journal, publisher, and field, and they change — a journal that accepted a one-line “the authors declare no conflict of interest” two years ago may now require a completed disclosure form for every author. The only reliable source is the journal’s own current instructions.

    Two places to check before you write a word of the section:

    1. The “Instructions for Authors” page on the journal’s own website — search for “conflict of interest” or “competing interests” specifically, since it’s often buried under a different heading than you’d expect.
    2. The submission portal itself. Many journals now require the disclosure as a structured form during upload (sometimes a standard uniform form used across a group of journals) rather than as free text in the manuscript, and you won’t see that requirement until you start the submission.

    If the policy isn’t clear from either, email the editorial office and ask before you submit — it’s a normal question and far better than guessing.

    What the section actually looks like

    Whatever the journal’s format, the disclosure itself is usually short. Two real shapes it takes:

    “The authors declare no conflict of interest.”

    “This work was supported by a research grant from [Company]. [Author] has received consulting fees from [Company] unrelated to this study. The funder had no role in the design, analysis, or interpretation of the data.”

    Notice the second example does two things: it names the relationship precisely, and it states — where true — that the funder had no editorial influence over the result. That second sentence is doing real work. It’s the difference between a disclosure that reassures a reader and one that just raises more questions.

    Getting the phrasing exact matters more here than almost anywhere else in a manuscript, because vague wording in a COI statement reads as evasive even when nothing is being hidden. If you want a second pair of eyes on the whole submission package before it goes out — disclosure section included — that’s the kind of detail a full publication-quality edit is built to catch.

    We go through disclosure statements, along with the rest of the submission checklist, in more depth in the peer review chapter of our book on fixing your academic English and publishing faster.

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