Tag: Spelling

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.