Proofreading Services for Research Papers

  The Importance of Reviewing and Revising  As wonderful as it may be to imagine that an academic or scientific article can reach a state of perfection when first written, this is highly unusual, and very few published authors consider their work perfect even after it has been carefully reviewed by them as well as their colleagues, proofreaders and editors, and appropriate revisions have been completed. Perfection is therefore somewhat elusive, but making a paper as good as it possibly can be before it is published is an attainable goal. Careful review and revision will be necessary to achieve this goal, however, so it is best to be prepared for this eventuality and grab it by the horns instead of shying away from it. The reviewing process should begin long before you submit your article. A careful read through your paper as soon as it is drafted when your writing is fresh in your mind will catch typing errors and enable refinement of both the language and the argument, w

  Minimum Publishable Units  Although the concept of publish or perish is far from new, it has never been more important to scholarly careers than it is in today’s digital world of instantaneous electronic and online publication. There is an incredible amount of pressure on modern academics and scientists to publish both rapidly and frequently, not only to communicate their research to their scholarly communities, but also to receive promotions, grants and salary increases. The temptation to divide the writing that results from active research into smaller and smaller articles in order to squeeze more publications out of the same amount of work is therefore natural and has never been greater. With some large, ongoing or multilayered research projects, this is both practical and necessary if the work is ever to be published in an academic or scientific journal, since most journals have strict word limits. They also tend to have rather strict requirements regarding what con

  The Perils of Hyphenation  Hyphens are not generally used when suffixes are added to words, so the resulting term is almost always closed, as ‘ladylike,’ ‘lifeless,’ ‘waterproof’ and ‘landscape’ are. However, if the word the suffix is added to already ends with two ‘l’s, a hyphen is needed before ‘-less’ and ‘-like,’ as in ‘stall-less’ and ‘fall-like.’ A hyphen is also needed when a suffix appears after a name or in rare combinations or newly coined terms: ‘London-like,’ for instance, and ‘vulture-like.’ Sometimes a word that is not technically a suffix, such as ‘style’ or ‘ready,’ appears as a suffix to form an adjective, in which case a hyphen is generally used, as it is in ‘computer-style graphics’ and ‘a camera-ready copy.’ Hyphens are generally used in verbs formed from noun compounds consisting of two words, so ‘to cross-reference’ is the verb derived from ‘a cross reference.’ Conversely, a noun formed from a phrasal verb is either hyphenated or one word, which me

  Possessives without an Apostrophe, and Compound and Linked Nouns  For some words, an apostrophe is not required to form the possessive case. The personal pronouns ‘our,’ ‘your,’ ‘her’ and ‘their,’ for instance, are already possessive forms (‘our home,’ ‘your article,’ ‘her dog’ and ‘their car’). However, an ‘s’ (without an apostrophe) can be added for a somewhat different use of these possessives, as in ‘the house is ours,’ ‘the article is yours,’ ‘the dog is hers’ and ‘the car is theirs.’ An ‘s’ alone should also be added to the pronoun ‘it’ to form the possessive, as in ‘the tree lost its branches in the storm.’ When both an apostrophe and an ‘s’ are added to ‘it’ (it’s), the result is not a possessive, but a contraction meaning either ‘it is’ or ‘it has.’ An ‘s’ alone to indicate possession is also used in other situations. It is an appropriate construction, for instance, when naming wars known by their length, so ‘the Hundred Years War’ is correct, but neither ‘the