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Category: Writing mechanics

  • 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.

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  • 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

  • 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

  • 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.

    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

  • 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.

    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