The purpose statement of a manuscript is the most important sentence in the paper. The entire manuscript is constructed around and flows from the purpose statement. If the purpose of your study is not clear, the reader will have difficulty understanding the need for...

Writers, teachers, journalists, librarians, avid readers, and politicians are all well aware that language, written or spoken, has power. Whether it’s a simple fact or a complex concept, the words used to share it have an effect on how it is understood and...

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,...