Redundancy is the needless repetition of words, phrases, sentences, paragraphs or ideas that mean the same thing. In a redundant phrase, the extra word adds nothing new. The modifying word’s meaning is contained in the word it is modifying. The goal of scientific...

 In an earlier blog, I described a number of strategies that I routinely apply to reduce the word count of manuscripts. However, even after applying all of these strategies, the paper may still be a bit too long – from just a few words to 100 or more words over the...

After a period (full stop), do you put one space or two spaces? People passionately belong to one camp or the other. And it seems to be somewhat age-related, with older people showing a preference for using two spaces, whereas younger people tend to use one space....

Last week I explored several citation management systems that store the full citation with abstract and make the job of formatting references within your manuscript much easier. But how do you keep track of all the papers (electronic PDFs) you read for your project,...

How do you input and format the citations when you’re writing up your essay, manuscript, thesis, or other lengthy document? You could easily have at least 40 or 50 references, more if it’s a review paper, and maybe even 150 or 200 or more if it’s a full thesis....

In the Instructions to Authors, most peer-reviewed journals specify the maximum length of a submitted manuscript. Word limits typically range from 3,000 to 4,000 or even 6,000 words, depending on the type of study – original article versus technical report versus...