Uni-edit Blog

Academic English writing, editing, translation and publishing

Uni-edit

Services

Free courses

Tag: Punctuation

  • 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 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