For my blog post, I thought I’d revisit my dark past on the other side of academic publishing when I worked as a copy editor and proofreader for two years between my undergrad and Masters. During this time, I worked primarily on review papers and news content. While I don’t claim to be a great writer or editor, I thought I’d share some easy tips to help refine your writing and make it more consistent. This is by no means an exhaustive list and probably most of them will already be familiar to you!

1. Consistency is key

I think two of the most important aspects of proofreading are ensuring consistency and using your common sense. For example, instead of agonizing over how you style a word, choose what you think is most appropriate and check that you’ve applied it consistently throughout the text. Check that style matches between the main text, headings, figure legends and footnotes. Some specific things to look for include the following:

• Capitalization
  • If you’ve capitalized headings, has this been done throughout?
• Italicization
  • E.g., have you italicized all your mentions of ‘in silico’? 
• Superscript and subscript
  • E.g., is ‘half-maximal inhibitory concentration (IC₅₀)‘ the same throughout? 
• Numbers
  • Have you mixed up numerical and spelled-out numbers?  
  • E.g., I drank five cups of coffee and 4 cups of tea. 

2. Check your abbreviations

Consider whether the abbreviation is widely known and how many times it is used in the text. If the abbreviation is uncommon and only mentioned a couple of times, this could create unnecessary confusion and ambiguity. Also, is the abbreviation informative? This is dependent on the subject area, but, for example, adding the Uniprot definition ‘proto-oncogene tyrosine-protein kinase SRC (SRC)’ is not that useful. 

Always check your abbreviations to make sure they are used consistently throughout the text (tip number 7 is helpful for this). Has it been used consistently throughout headings and captions? Have you provided the definition in the same way in figure legends and table footnotes? 

3. Check UK versus US spelling

It can be easy to mix up UK and US spelling so check what the requirements are for your specific piece of work. If you are unsure, check the dictionary (I tend to use the OED for UK spelling).  

4. Check for long, convoluted sentences

While long sentences are not necessarily bad, I find this is often the most common culprit when a sentence or paragraph lacks clarity. Most of the time, this can easily be solved by breaking the sentence into two or introducing punctuation like semi-colons. Tip number 6 is the most useful for spotting this! If in doubt, get someone else to read it and see if it makes sense to them.  

5. Check the literature

If you’re not sure how to style a word (for example, the capitalization or hyphenation of a protein or gene name), the easiest thing to do is check existing papers to see what is standard in the literature. And then make sure it’s consistent! 

6. Read your work aloud or get someone else to read it

When you’ve spent days or weeks writing a piece of work, it can become difficult to spot mistakes or sections that don’t make sense. I find that the way that I read a piece of work when writing and when editing is completely different. Taking a step back and reading your work out loud or giving it to someone else is great for picking up on silly errors that you don’t notice when in ‘writing mode’. 

7. Ctrl + F is your friend

This is so easy to do and so easy for picking up things that you might not necessarily notice when reading through 20 pages of text! 

8. En-dashes and em-dashes

I won’t provide too much detail as there are lots of comprehensive explanations available explaining the difference between the two. In short, an en-dash is slightly longer than a hyphen and can be used to indicate a range, complex or relationship (e.g., 200–300 ml or the blood–brain barrier). An em-dash is even longer and is used in a similar way to parentheses to provide emphasis (e.g., Yorkshire Gold — my favourite brand of tea — was reduced in Waitrose). 

9. Commas versus semi-colons

Again, I won’t go into too much detail about punctuation as there are so many resources out there, but I often find when proofreading friends’ work that the two can be mixed up. The most common mistake I see is the use of commas before conjunctive adverbs, such as ‘therefore’ or ‘however’. 

• Incorrect: The bakery was closed, therefore I didn’t buy a sandwich. 
• Correct: The bakery was closed; therefore, I didn’t buy a sandwich. 

10. A few specific quick tips

• That versus which 
  • That is used to define something, whereas which is used to introduce more information and always follows a comma. 
  • The doughnut that I ate last night was filled with jam. 
  • Last night’s doughnut, which was filled with jam, was very tasty. 
• Due to versus owing to 
  • ‘Due to’ is used to modify a noun, while ‘owing to’ is used to modify a verb. 
  • The closure of the doughnut shop was due to all doughnuts being sold. 
  • The doughnut shop closed early owing to all the doughnuts being sold. 
• Significant  
  • Significant is normally used to indicate statistical significance. If this is not the case, change it to substantial or another suitable word. 

Happy proofreading,

Steph