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  • Hedging vs Overclaiming: How Confident Should Your Writing Sound?

    How confident should a sentence in your paper sound? The honest answer: exactly as confident as your evidence lets you be — no more, no less. That’s the whole rule. Most of the “weak English” comments reviewers leave aren’t grammar problems at all. They’re confidence problems: a claim stated too timidly to be useful, or too boldly to be defensible.

    This is where non-native writers get flagged most often, and it runs in both directions. Over-hedge and a reviewer reads “the results may possibly suggest a potential trend” and wonders why you’re not sure of your own data. Overclaim and they read “this proves that X causes Y” and reach for the rejection template before they’ve finished the sentence. Neither writer is wrong about the finding. Both are wrong about how much weight one sentence should carry.

    The test: does the citation earn the claim?

    Uni-edit’s Writing Tip 14 puts it plainly: a citation is not decoration at the end of a sentence, it’s the thing doing the evidential work. So before you soften or strengthen a claim, ask what’s actually behind it. One study, narrow scope, contested finding? Hedge, and hedge specifically. A finding that’s been replicated across the field? State it as fact and let the citation carry the confidence — you don’t also need “clearly” or “undoubtedly” stapled onto it.

    Two ways to report a finding

    Reporting verbs. “Show,” “demonstrate,” “report,” “found” — these attach a finding to whoever found it, which matters when the result is specific or still debated. Active voice does this better than passive: “Terahara et al. found that transcription factor Spi-B is specifically expressed by M cells (2008)” tells the reader who is claiming what. The passive version — “it has been found that Spi-B is expressed” — quietly drops the person making the claim, which is exactly the move a skeptical reviewer notices.

    Fact plus citation. For a settled, field-wide point, you don’t need a verb at all. “M cells transport antigens across the intestinal epithelium (Neutra et al., 2001)” is a statement, not a claim you’re personally vouching for — the citation is doing that. Wrapping it in “it has been reported that” adds words without adding certainty.

    The tip also flags a smaller, useful trick: enumerating. “One study found…” reads differently from “several studies have found…”, and neither requires you to name every paper. It’s a cheap, accurate way to signal how much the field agrees with you, before your reader even reaches the citation.

    When disagreement is the finding

    Sometimes the honest sentence is the uncertain one, and that’s not a weakness to edit out. If you’re corroborating a weak result, contradicting a prior study, or flagging an open debate in the field, say so directly — “in contrast to Smith et al. (2019), we found…” — rather than either burying the disagreement in hedges or overclaiming your way past it. A hedge that reflects real uncertainty is doing its job. A hedge that’s just there because the sentence felt too bare in translation is the one worth cutting.

    University English Hub: how verb tense changes the mood of a claim in your Introduction.

    The video covers the tense side of this — how the same finding reads differently in simple past versus present perfect. Worth five minutes if reporting-verb choice is new to you; the rest of this post is what to do once tense is settled and you’re deciding how much certainty the sentence should actually carry.

    Where this quietly falls apart

    Reference problems are the easiest thing for a reviewer to find and the least defensible when found — a mismatched year, a citation that doesn’t actually support the claim it’s attached to, a reference list entry that doesn’t match the in-text call. If your confidence rests on a citation, that citation has to survive a check. Uni-edit’s reference and citation checking service exists for exactly that gap — verifying every in-text citation against the reference list and the source itself, separately from a full language edit.

    The wording problem — where hedges and reporting verbs sit relative to each claim — is what a full edit catches, because it needs someone reading the argument as a whole, not just checking each sentence in isolation. That’s the kind of pass Uni-edit’s Level 3 editing does: reading for where a claim overreaches its evidence or undersells it, alongside the language itself.

    This idea sits inside a longer chapter, “How to Write to Publish Internationally,” if you want the fuller treatment with more worked examples. And if you’d rather have one of these land in your inbox before you need it, Uni-edit’s writing and publication emails cover this kind of thing regularly.

    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

  • Comprises vs Consists Of: What’s the Real Difference?

    Here’s the one-line version: comprises never takes “of,” consists always does, and if you’re not sure which one you just wrote, check for “of” and you’ll know instantly. “The committee comprises five members” is right. “The committee consists of five members” is right. “The committee comprises of five members” — the single most common slip we see in this family of verbs — is not.

    That one fix alone will catch a real error in a lot of manuscripts. But there’s a second, bigger distinction underneath it that most style guides skip past, and it’s the one worth actually learning.

    The exhaustive list problem

    All of these verbs mean roughly “is made up of”: consists of, comprises, is composed of, constitutes, makes up, includes. But they split into two families depending on whether what follows is the whole list or only part of it.

    Include and contain are non-exhaustive. They tell the reader there’s more than what’s named. “Asia includes China, Japan, and Korea” is true precisely because Asia includes plenty of other countries too. You’d never write “Asia includes China, Japan, Korea, [the other 45 countries]” — that’s not what “include” is for.

    Consist of, comprise, be composed of, constitute, and make up are exhaustive. They promise the reader the whole thing is now accounted for. “North America consists of three countries: the USA, Canada, and Mexico” — full stop, that’s all of them. If you’d left out Mexico, the sentence would be factually wrong, not just incomplete, because “consists of” makes a completeness claim that “includes” doesn’t.

    This is the mistake we actually see in manuscripts: authors reach for “consists of” or “comprises” out of habit when they mean “includes,” and end up implicitly claiming a list is complete when it isn’t. If your methods section says “the dataset consists of images from three hospitals” and there’s a fourth hospital’s data in there somewhere, a careful reviewer will notice the arithmetic doesn’t add up before they notice anything else about your method.

    The four exhaustive verbs, with real examples

    Once you’re in exhaustive-list territory, here’s how the four common options actually behave, based on the sentence patterns we see across edited manuscripts:

    • Consist of — the safest default. “The panel consists of three reviewers and a chair.” Whole thing, active voice, no controversy.
    • Comprise — same meaning, no “of.” “A simple circuit comprises a source of voltage, a conductive path, and a resistor.” Writing “is comprised of” is extremely common but disputed by several style authorities as a hybrid of “consists of” and “is composed of” — if a target journal is strict about usage, “consists of” sidesteps the argument entirely.
    • Composed of — almost always passive. “The receptor is composed of five subunits.” You wouldn’t say “five subunits compose the receptor” in a methods section even though it’s grammatical; the passive is what readers expect here.
    • Constitute — reverses the direction. The parts constitute the whole, not the other way round: “automobile exhaust constitutes a large proportion of total greenhouse gas emissions.” Constitute is also the natural choice when you’re arguing that something counts as a category, not just listing its pieces.

    Made up of sits with this group too and is the most conversational option: “Seeds and fern spores make up the finch’s diet.” It reads slightly less formal than “consists of,” which is fine in a discussion section and worth avoiding in an abstract.

    The 30-second test

    Before your next submission, search your manuscript for “consist,” “comprise,” and “compose.” For each hit, ask two questions: does “of” belong here, and is this actually the complete list? If either answer surprises you, you’ve just found something worth fixing before a reviewer finds it for you.

    We cover the full logic — including why “includes” and “contains” are the safer choice whenever you’re not 100% sure your list is complete — in Writing Tip 5, and there’s a short video walkthrough on choosing the right word more generally if that’s easier to follow than text.

    “How do I choose the best word or phrase in my writing?” — University English Hub

    This is one small case of a much bigger habit: precise word choice, sentence by sentence, across an entire paper. If you want to see how much that kind of scrutiny changes a manuscript, our editors apply it at Level 3 editing, working through structure and phrasing line by line, not just fixing typos. And if you’d rather go deeper on your own first, the “Similar Words in Your Research Paper” chapter in our e-book on fixing academic English covers this family of near-synonyms alongside the other word-choice traps that show up most often in submitted manuscripts.

    If you’d rather these land in your inbox one at a time instead of hunting through fifteen writing tips, you can subscribe to our writing and publication emails — this is the kind of thing we send.

    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

  • American vs British English: which one should your paper use?

    Check your target journal’s Author Guidelines for which English variant it wants, and then use only that one, all the way through. That’s the whole rule. Most of the anxiety around “colour or color?” disappears the moment you realise it isn’t really a language question — it’s an instructions-for-authors question.

    We see the mixed version a lot: a manuscript that says “analyse” in the Methods and “analyze” in the Discussion, or “the results are shown in the table below” next to “the results are summarised in Table 3.” No reviewer is going to reject a paper purely for this. But it reads as sloppy, and sloppy is exactly the impression you don’t want a reviewer forming before they’ve even reached your data.

    American and British aren’t the only two, but they’re the two that matter for spelling

    English is genuinely a family of standard varieties, not one system with a few typos in it. Australian and Canadian English each blend American and British conventions in their own way — Canadian English, for instance, tends to keep British spellings like “colour” and “centre” but American terms like “apartment” and “gas.” For journal writing, though, only two variants are actually codified enough for a copyeditor to check against: American English and British English. That’s the choice you’re really making.

    The differences that actually turn up in manuscripts fall into a few small, memorisable buckets:

    • -ize / -ise: “characterize” (US) vs. “characterise” (UK) — though note British usage itself is split, and “-ize” is acceptable in UK English too (it’s the Oxford spelling).
    • -or / -our: “color,” “behavior” (US) vs. “colour,” “behaviour” (UK).
    • -er / -re: “center,” “liter” (US) vs. “centre,” “litre” (UK).
    • -og / -ogue: “analog,” “catalog” (US) vs. “analogue,” “catalogue” (UK).
    • Single vs. double consonant: “traveled” (US) vs. “travelled” (UK).
    • Collective nouns: “the team is” (US, singular) vs. “the team are” (UK, plural is common) — this one has nothing to do with spelling and everything to do with grammar, which is why spell-check won’t catch it.

    How to actually find out which one your journal wants

    Go to the journal’s own “Instructions for Authors” or “Author Guidelines” page — not a summary of it, not what a labmate remembers, the current version on the journal’s site, because these do change. Search that page for the word “English.” Most journals say something close to one of these:

    “Authors should use either US English or UK English, but not a mixture of the two.”

    That’s the instruction to look for. If you find it, you’re done — pick one and hold the line for the whole manuscript, including the abstract, figure captions, and supplementary files people tend to forget about.

    If the guidelines say nothing at all about spelling — which happens more than you’d think — American English is the safer default. It’s what the majority of international journals, indexing databases, and reference managers are built around, so when in doubt, that’s the one to reach for.

    One more real-world wrinkle: UK-based publishers and journals affiliated with UK institutions or societies usually do prefer UK spelling, even when their guidelines don’t spell it out. Same logic applies to Australian and Canadian journals and their own regional conventions. If you’re submitting somewhere with an obvious national affiliation, that’s a useful tiebreaker.

    There’s a short video that walks through exactly how to locate and read a journal’s Instructions for Authors, if you’d rather watch someone do it than read about it.

    Checking your own draft once you’ve decided

    Your word processor’s spell-checker only knows the dictionary it’s set to, so the fastest first pass is making sure the whole document — not just the section you’re typing in right now — is set to the same English variant. In Word, that’s Review → Language → Set Proofing Language, applied to the entire manuscript, not paragraph by paragraph.

    After that, spell-check will flag most spelling inconsistencies, but it won’t catch grammar differences like “the data is” vs. “the data are,” or “the team is planning” vs. “the team are planning.” Those need an actual read-through, and they’re exactly the kind of thing a second pair of eyes catches faster than the person who wrote the sentence and already knows what they meant.

    If picking the target journal in the first place is the part you’re stuck on — spelling variant included, since it flows from that choice — there’s a chapter on selecting a target journal in Uni-edit’s compiled guide to fixing your academic English and publishing faster that goes through it in more depth.

    And if you’d rather not proofread the whole manuscript for consistency yourself, that’s a standard part of what a full English edit checks — variant consistency included, alongside grammar, structure, and phrasing.

    The one-line version to remember: check the journal’s Author Guidelines for its English preference, and if it doesn’t say, use American English and stay consistent throughout.

    If you want more of these sent to you as you write, Uni-edit’s writing and publication emails cover one practical 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