Ultimate guide to planning well-organised manuscripts for life scientists: an English scientific editor's top tips
Planning is essential for well-organised manuscripts
It’s no secret that experienced authors — whether they write technical documents, children’s books or romance novels — make solid plans and outlines before they write a single word.
In the same way, I recommend you should plan your whole manuscript as a simple list of bullet points before you start to actually write. That's because it is virtually impossible to write well if you haven’t...
Using adverbs such as “additionally” and “however” as the building blocks of good scientific writing
Most students and researchers find it easy to collect information from the literature for the introduction or discussion section of their manuscript.
However, linking different facts together to produce logical, clear text is often difficult, especially if you do not have English as first language.
In this post, we’ll show you how it’s easy to use adverbs as “building blocks” in your writing to link or move between different ideas.
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How to avoid “claims of first discovery” but still tell readers your research is novel
Every researcher wants to tell the world they are the first to find out something new
Unfortunately, many journals’ instructions to authors specifically ask that you avoid using phrases like “we provide the first evidence”, “this is the first discovery” or “we are the first group to prove that…”. These phrases are often referred to as “claims of novelty or priority”, “statements of novelty or priority”...
One simple way make your scientific writing more professional
There is one phrase that you should leave out of your manuscripts:
The results showed that……
This phrase repeatedly comes up in the papers we edit and our editors always delete it or change it. I’ll explain why we suggest you should avoid using these words in this blog post, and we provide some useful alternatives to help you improve your scientific writing.
"The results showed” is often unnecessary
It is usually obvious you...
Why are double negatives so confusing in scientific writing?
Recently, I was editing a manuscript and found a sentence that reminded me of the importance of avoiding “double negatives” in scientific writing.
The patient had no abnormal blood glucose or insulin levels.
What are double negatives?
Double negative phrases are often used in informal spoken English, for example: "I didn’t do no cooking", "he never ate no food" and "they don’t know nothing".
In mathematics, two negatives always make...
How to avoid 12 common scientific writing errors that annoy journal reviewers
In this post, I’m going to provide a quick overview of the most common basic errors our editors see in scientific manuscripts.
1. Check for spelling mistakes
This is obvious, yet it is surprising how many spelling mistakes our editors see in manuscripts. Firstly, use the spell check feature, making sure it is applied to all of the text in the file. Secondly, choose the correct language (e.g., US/American English or UK/British English) for your target journal or thesis...
I remember trying to write my first manuscript. Why was it so difficult? Why did I feel like a failure?
Now I’m a scientific editor, I know every single scientist struggles (or at least used to struggle) with writing manuscripts.
That’s why I’ve created a simple, FREE checklist to help you write better manuscripts.
