Tag: Precision

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.

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.

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