The Proofreading Pulse

If you’re looking to get your Christian writing published professionally, though, it’s not enough to be an excellent writer moved by the Holy Spirit; you’ll also need to demonstrate that you can stick to professional publishing guidelines and standards.

even when used properly, figures of speech and idioms, what we might generally call “poetic language,” can be inappropriate for academic writing.

I think it’s safe to say that the majority of adults who live in Western societies hold a job with regular hours and some degree of financial security. Whether they earn a salary or an hourly wage, they go to work in the same place and receive a certain, predetermined income. Others, however, find themselves in circumstances where keeping a regular schedule is difficult, if not impossible.

We’re talking about the recipe on the page, the step-by-step instructions for making the food, which requires being specific enough to reassure cooks they’re doing the right thing without distracting them with information they don’t need in the kitchen.

I never intended to become an independent contract proofreader, working from a lounge chair in a tropical forest on the Pacific coast of Mexico. But I love words and water, so that’s what happened.

It’s a good time to talk about formal vs. informal texting and texting vs. writing emails.

Quotes from outside sources are useful and necessary in research papers. If your paper includes a literature review in which you discuss your field’s relevant literature, you will use quotes to add clarity and precision to your summary and analysis.

Dummy subject can add unnecessary fluff to a sentence, thus distracting readers from the point and muddling the writer’s meaning. They're easy to avoid.

Today, seeing as artists come in all manner of genders, and not many of us are Greco-Roman pagans, we can replace “female” with “Other” and “goddess” with “free agent” and see the Muse as very much alive and well in an artist’s life.

The next style we’re looking at is another of these specialist fields: medicine. The American Medical Association (AMA) has a particular style it prefers authors to follow when writing, and pre-med and medical students, doctors in residency, and researchers may all be asked to use this.

The physical sciences (e.g., physics, chemistry, genetics, biological sciences, astronomy) often rely on CSE referencing, a style created and updated by the Council of Scientific Editors.

“Olde English” is all made up, but the individual words themselves did exist in general conversation, and they do come with grammar rules.

I encounter incorrectly used words (and made up words) all the time, and today I’ll write about some I’ve noticed popping quite a bit recently, particularly in academic writing.

A species of unconscious wordplay, eggcorns tend to be individual quirks; some, though, have become widespread in print, and a few have even started crowding the “proper” version of the phrase out of use.

Vancouver referencing, is a numeric system and the preferred style for most biomedical journals, so it applies to topics in medicine, biology, microbiology, neuroscience, and a whole range of other subjects.

With long electronic documents, it can be useful to make links that take readers to different sections of the paper, such as to a definition, a reference, or a table. For this, MS Word has the function Insert—Cross-reference.

The whole point of grammar is that the audience shouldn’t have to guess at what you’re trying to say. Missing vocative commas deeply change the meaning of their sentences,

Titles come in many shapes and sizes, but they all have rules for formatting that you master with just a little work. Italics, quotes, even plain text: they all apply in certain situations. How do you know which is which?