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Category: Word choice

  • 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.

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  • 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

  • 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.

    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.

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  • 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