Most students don’t have the time, money or need to engage the services of a professional editor for their written works. (Mind you, those with particularly poor written language skills should seriously consider doing so when writing a major thesis, lest their final presentation do scant justice to the hard work leading up to it.) It is as well, though, to be aware of some of the basics of editing in order that the reader not be subjected to annoying distractions from the content. The last thing a student needs is an annoyed assessor!
So I offer here some guidelines for students writing assignments, essays and theses. Familiarize yourself with them before you commence your writing project. You may care, too, to peruse my Hints for Writers page which addresses a broader audience. Don’t be put off by the length of this page of hints: this is partly due to describing in some detail concepts and techniques that, once learned, should remain with you for as long as the technology remains similar to that you are using now. Some of these guidelines may appear arcane and nitpicking, but our ancestors developed them for a reason — namely, to optimize readability while conveying the intended meaning with clarity — and we ignore them at our peril. If anything here conflicts with the demands of your assessors, prudence dictates that the latter take precedence.
These guidelines make no pretence at completeness. You will be aware that whole books are written about English grammar alone. It may be that you need to read one of them! But I hope that the following selection of topics will, for most of you, go a long way towards sparing you unnecessary embarrassment and perhaps even seducing your assessor into being more generous than the actual content of your manuscript might deserve!
If you still consider it prudent to engage the services of a professional editor, attention to these guidelines should drastically reduce both the editor’s time and your expense in arriving at the final manuscript. Whatever you submit to an editor should be what you consider to be your final version: too often, tampering with a manuscript after it has been edited by an expert results in unfortunate — and avoidable! — blemishes on the finished product.
Be aware that the main impediment to successful do-it-yourself editing is lack of awareness of the editor! By this I mean that you don’t know when you have “got it wrong”, so it does not even occur to you to consult a dictionary or a book on grammar, let alone a technical reference relevant to the subject matter. The best remedy is to get a more knowledgeable person to read your manuscript, but you need to be convinced that they are in fact more knowledgeable in the right areas! Without such a guru, keep asking yourself: What am I assuming here?
Don’t copy other people slavishly: they may be wrong.
A large department store once advertised a sale with a window poster along the lines of “The early bird get’s the worm”. That apostrophe should not have been there! But how many people’s writing is now contaminated due to its prominent display?
Synonyms are not always interchangeable: they generally convey subtle nuances of meaning that may or may not be appropriate in your particular context. Once you have a synonym in mind, check its meaning in a dictionary.
Beware of unwarranted precision.
Suppose 66 out of 99 studies concluded that X = Y. Is it really appropriate to say that “66.7% of studies concluded that X = Y”, rather than that “Two-thirds of studies concluded that X = Y”? If it were 60 out of 99, I would still say, “Two-thirds of studies concluded that X = Y”, or perhaps, “Almost two-thirds of studies concluded that X = Y”.
Read what you write — out loud. If it doesn’t sound right, it probably isn’t. In particular, if it doesn’t sound like the sort of thing you would say in ordinary speech, it may be that you are trying too hard to appear erudite, in which case you need to be sure you are using words and grammar correctly. It may be prudent to seek a second opinion.
Be on the alert for ambiguity. Is there more than one way for the reader to interpret this? Is this what you want?
A common ambiguity concerns the referent (what the word refers to) of third-person pronouns and their ilk (words in the set {he, she, it, they, him, her, them, his, her, its, their, hers, theirs}). Make sure the word refers to the person or thing you intend it to, and that the reader is not left confused if there is a choice of possibilities. If there is any ambiguity, use the noun (the name of the person or thing) once more instead of the pronoun (that stands for the noun).
Be consistent.
I assume in what follows that you are using a computer and a word processor, rather than a pen and paper, but this by no means is meant to decry use of the latter which in fact has some distinct advantages. A method of re-ordering chunks of text when writing with pen and paper is described on my Hints for Writers page.
If you are using a computer and a word processor, make them earn their keep. Explore the features of your operating system and your word processor, and then milk them for all they’re worth: if you don’t, you might as well be using a typewriter. If you find yourself repeating something, find a way to automate it, be that via a ruler, a style, a macro or whatever. You would be surprised how many university graduates with countless assignments, essays and theses under their belt remain unaware of many of the formatting techniques I describe below. Sure, they may have got their degrees, but one can only marvel at their ignorance of the tools they employed on a daily basis and lament the waste of time entailed in their failing to use them to their best advantage. My aim here is to make your academic life easier than theirs!
Learn to use paragraph rulers (or “rulers” for short). A ruler allows you to set the left indent and right indent positions of a paragraph; ie, the imaginary vertical lines on the page within which your paragraph is constrained. You drag the little markers to the desired positions on the ruler. As the first line of a paragraph is often meant to look different from subsequent lines, a special marker is provided to set the first line indent (or outdent, as the case may be: whereas the former will make the first line shorter than the others, the latter will make it longer). Do not use a left tab to do the work of a first line indent marker: this is lazy. An even greater sin is to use a succession of spaces to do the job of a first line indent marker; there are several reasons why it is a sin, but the only one you need to remember is that I command you not to do it!
Rulers also allow you to set a number of tab positions, so-called from typewriter days when striking the tab key would propel the paper horizontally to the next position on the line for typing tabulated numbers or text (ie, stopping at the left margin of the next column of data). Computer tabs are more versatile than typewriter ones: whereas the latter were all left tabs, the former can now be left, right, center, decimal or leader tabs. I discuss the uses of some of these in what follows.
Depending on your software, other information can also be stored in your ruler settings, often via a toolbar of some sort. Such information can include the text alignment (eg, right-justified text has the right ends of lines all lining up beautifully along an imaginary vertical line, while the left margin of the paragraph may look “ragged”), the amount of spacing between lines in a paragraph, the amount of spacing between consecutive paragraphs, and perhaps some other things as well.
Paragraph ruler settings apply to whichever paragraphs you have selected. You don’t have to select the whole of a paragraph, only part of it. In fact, for a single paragraph, you only have to click anywhere within the paragraph in order to work with the ruler for the whole of that paragraph.
Ordinarily, typing a paragraph return creates a new paragraph which inherits the ruler of the preceding paragraph. One of the reasons for using styles (see below) is to alter this inherited behavior.
Paragraph rulers allow you to be consistent in your formatting, which always impresses a reader, even if only subconsciously! One of the great things about rulers (in some word processors at least) is that they can be copied and pasted, just like other computer objects. (In the absence of this capability, a word processor may expect you to use an often more cumbersome style approach instead.) Look under your Edit or Format menu for the appropriate commands, but, as always with commands you will be using frequently in long projects, learn the keyboard shortcuts for them, for more rapid application. Click anywhere inside a paragraph, copy its ruler, click anywhere inside another paragraph (or select several paragraphs at once), paste the ruler and voilà! — all the paragraphs are now governed by the same ruler. Some word processors allow you to assign names to rulers, but named formats are usually the province of styles (discussed below).
In general, tables are best set out directly in a word processor, rather than using a table tool or a spreadsheet. Even tables with nested row headings (where two or more rows, each having its own row heading, are combined into a group of rows with a single row heading in a column to the left) can be dealt with more flexibly directly in the word processor (eg, by altering line spacing).
A column of numbers should be aligned in a pleasing way. If the numbers contain decimal points (as with monetary amounts), the decimal points should all lie on the same vertical line. To achieve this, insert a tab character (ie, hit the tab key) before each number. When you have typed all the numbers in your table, select all the rows containing numbers and put a decimal tab in the ruler at the position desired for the first column of numbers. You will see immediately that all the decimal points of the numbers in that column come to line up vertically at this tab position. You can move the tab to and fro along the ruler to adjust the position to your satisfaction. Do the same for all the columns of numbers in your table. If the numbers do not contain decimal points, their units digits should all lie on the same vertical line. Proceed exactly as above, but this time make your tabs right tabs rather than decimal tabs. Note that in some situations it may be desirable to supplement these techniques with the use of a fixed-width font (such as Courier or Monaco).
A simply numbered list is one whose items are preceded by (generally consecutive) integers. To format the ruler for such a list, set the markers for the first line indent and the right indent. To the right of the first line indent, set a right tab, positioning it far enough from the first line indent that the largest item number in your list will fit between the two. A little farther to the right of that right tab, set a left tab: the space between the two tabs might be the equivalent of two typical characters, say. Finally, set the left indent: I like it to be a couple of characters to the right of the left tab, but you frequently see it in the same position as the left tab. Now, when you type each list item, start by hitting the tab key, then type the item number (perhaps enclosed in parentheses or followed by a period), then hit the tab key again, then type the item itself. Once you’ve typed a couple of list items and seen what it all looks like, you might tweak some of the ruler settings to obtain the most pleasing result.
Whereas rulers, as the name suggests, format your manuscript with respect to measurable things (such as paragraph indents, tab positions, line spacing), styles allow you to format other aspects of your text (such as font, font size, font face) as well. A style is a set of text attributes: you choose the set of attributes you want, then give the set a name. Your word processor will probably come with some styles built in; you can use these as is, modify them to suit yourself, or create your own styles de novo. To apply a style to a chunk of text, you select the text, then choose the desired style from a list of named styles.
There are different sorts of styles; eg, character, paragraph, note, list.
I prefer uncommon foreign-language expressions (such as “ad nauseam”) to be italicized.
When specifying a scientific quantity, I prefer to separate number and units with a space. Besides offering greater clarity, this format is more sustainable in a wider number of situations.
Match singular subjects with singular verbs and plural subjects with plural verbs. It is all too common to see a singular subject paired with a plural verb, generally because they are separated by a phrase containing a plural noun which is wrongly assumed to be the subject.
Recognize and avoid dangling participles. Roughly speaking, dangling participles are “-ing” or “-ed” forms of verbs that are separated from their proper subject, with resultant ambiguity in who or what is performing the indicated action.
Example: “John visited the Japanese garden. Having dined at the garden restaurant, the cherry trees looked magnificent.” Here, “Having dined” is the dangling participle: it’s supposed to be John who has done the dining, but the sentence structure gives the impression that it’s the cherry trees that partook of the restaurant fare. Be alert for clauses that begin sentences but contain no subject: make sure the subsequent subject is the person or thing performing the action indicated in the opening clause. One possible correction of the above example: “Having dined at the garden restaurant, John thought the cherry trees looked magnificent.”
Distinguish between transitive and intransitive verbs, and use them appropriately. The former require objects; the latter do not. Failing to provide a transitive verb with an object is a not uncommon error. The situation is complicated by the fact that some verbs have the same spelling but slightly different meanings: whether or not the word requires an object depends on the meaning. Perhaps the most useful advice one can give here is to consult a dictionary whenever you use an unfamiliar verb or use a familiar verb in a somewhat unusual way (as, for example, when you are trying to sound academic when that does not come naturally to you).
Use apostrophes correctly. They indicate a contraction (as in “that’s” for “that is”) or possession (as in “oxygen’s atomic number”). Note in particular that “it’s” always means “it is” and does not indicate possession; eg, there is rightly no apostrophe in the (grammatically correct) expression, “The dog chased its tail”. When used to indicate possession, the apostrophe precedes the “s” when it follows a singular or a collective noun (as in “Betty’s books” or “the people’s choice”) and follows the “s” when it follows a plural noun ending in “s” (as in “countries’ capitals”).
Apostrophes do not represent opening single quotes, as you can see when using “smart” (curly) quotes: opening single quotes curve in the same direction as opening parentheses, while apostrophes curve in the same direction as closing parentheses.
Apostrophes are not used in plural forms except perhaps in expressions such as “TV’s” and “4WD’s”.
Although one increasingly sees otherwise (as in the department store advertisement mentioned above), correct grammar dictates that the present tense forms of verbs never contain apostrophes before the concluding “s”.
In general, people these days tend to use more apostrophes than they should: just make sure you use yours appropriately.
Use quotation marks correctly. I prefer smart double quotes: smart because they generally look nicer, and double because there is less confusion with apostrophes.
Note that nested quotes (quotes within quotes) are single quotes if the outer ones are double quotes, and double quotes if the outer ones are single; eg, “No matter how many times I told him to ‘Look before you leap’, he just went at things like a bull at a gate.”.
Use of smart quotes carries with it the responsibility to distinguish correctly between apostrophes and opening single quotes. For example, in “I knew ’twas brillig” a word processor will place an opening single quote before “twas” whereas it should be an apostrophe (which may most easily be achieved by copying and pasting one from elsewhere). Observe how confusing this expression would be if single quotes were used. Despite this, many publishing houses use single quotes as their house style.
Balance paired delimiters. Paired delimiters are things like quotation marks, parentheses, brackets and braces that come in pairs and enclose (delimit) pieces of text between them. People commonly forget to include the second of the pair (the closing delimiter). It is, however, acceptable to omit closing quotation marks at the conclusion of all but the last of a set of contiguous paragraphs consisting entirely of quoted text from the one source; in this situation, each paragraph commences with an opening quotation mark, but only the last ends with a closing quotation mark.
To make things easier for the reader, only use nested parentheses (parentheses within parentheses) when syntax prescribes them (eg, in some mathematical expressions or in well-formed formulae in a logic formal system). In all other situations use a hierarchy of delimiters instead. I tend to use parentheses as the default, enclosing them within brackets if necessary and both of them within braces if yet another level of delimiters is required, thus: “Xxxx {xxx [xxx (xxx) xxx] xxx} xxx.”.
Learn to discriminate among the three dashes that sit at the same level above the baseline of a line of text; viz, the hyphen (-), the en dash (–) and the em dash (—). Note how they differ in length, the latter two being of similar length to the characters “n” and “m” respectively, hence the names. Not only do they have different uses, but due attention to the spacing around them will make your manuscript appear more polished.
The hyphen is mostly used to combine two or more words or word roots into a single word (eg, “door-to-door”, “anti-aircraft”). If you’re not sure whether you are dealing with a single (unhyphenated) word, a hyphenated word or expression, or a string of separate words, use your dictionary. Hyphens never have a preceding space and only ever have a trailing space when used in abbreviated expressions such as “pro- and anti-abortion lobbies”.
The en dash is used to signify subtraction and negative numbers; in the former case, there are leading and trailing spaces (one of each), while negation is so intimately associated with a number that there is never a trailing space and only a leading space if there would have been one before the number anyway. En dashes represent a set of intervening items in such expressions as “1–10” or “July–September” where the en dash may be read as “to” or “through” and has no leading or trailing spaces. I also like to use an en dash immediately after a colon when a subsequent list begins on the next line rather than on the same line.
The em dash is something I think you get a feel for. It sets fragments of text apart from one another, sometimes acting a bit like a parenthesis when you’re having a minor detour from the main thought and sometimes acting a bit like a colon or a semi-colon when you’re putting a special “twist” on the main thought. While some publishing houses deny em dashes the cushioning afforded by spaces, I prefer to see an em dash preceded by a space and followed by a space.
To insert an en dash anywhere on a Mac, type option+hyphen (that’s two keys: hold the option key down while you hit the hyphen key). To get an em dash, type shift+option+hyphen.
I am not sure how one inserts these characters elsewhere on a Windows machine, but in Microsoft Word you can go to the Insert menu, choose Symbol… and then hit the Special Characters tab where the characters can be found. The relevant Keyboard Shortcuts are somewhat arcane — I’m not sure how one proceeds in the absence of a numeric keypad — so you may like to alter them to suit yourself.
Learn to use the four main clause separators to best advantage: comma (,), semi-colon (;), colon (:), and full stop or period (.). Essentially they represent, in the order given here, pauses of increasing length.
Besides separating clauses (chunks of text containing verbs), the first two (comma and semi-colon) can also separate items in a list. A comma generally suffices to separate list items, but a semi-colon may be preferred if the strings of text describing the items already contain commas. If the final two clauses in a sentence, or the final two items in a list, are separated by a conjunction (eg, “and”, “or”, “but”), it is a matter of personal preference whether or not the penultimate clause or item is followed by a comma (or semi-colon). British and Australian practice is to forego the comma (or semi-colon); American practice is to insert it. My own practice is to use it if a pause would be helpful to the reader: the shorter the sentence, the less likely a pause will be needed.
The main uses of the colon are to herald a list or to indicate that what follows is a brief explication of what was stated earlier in the sentence.
Whether to separate clauses with a semi-colon or colon, or to split them completely into stand-alone sentences with a full stop (or period), depends on their weight relative to the weight of other sentences in the same paragraph. Generally speaking, all sentences in a given paragraph should be of equal weight or importance.
Computer spell-checkers have their limitations. They can return false positives: something is flagged as incorrectly spelt when in fact it is correctly spelt. This occurs when the flagged word is not in the spell-checker’s dictionary — a not uncommon occurrence in technical writing. They can also return false negatives: they fail to flag something that is incorrectly spelt. This occurs when a correctly spelt word is used incorrectly; eg, “if” when it should be “of”, or “principal” when “principle” is meant. Errors in grammar and punctuation will also evade capture by spell-checkers, as when “it’s” is erroneously used to indicate possession or when “lay” is used when “lie” should have been. Computer spell-checkers give a false sense of security: rely on them at your peril. They are not a substitute for thinking!
Make sure you spell the names of people and places correctly.
Be consistent in your spelling, particularly with respect to capitalization.
All editors have their own personal gripes — things that set their teeth on edge and prompt them to wield their red pen with a vengeance. Here are some of mine:–
“…comprising of…”: it should be either “comprising” or “comprised of”, not “comprising of”.
In common with many other pedants, I deplore the current widespread use of “impact” as a transitive verb. I prefer “impact on” or “affect”.
Using a single closing parenthesis when introducing an item in an in-line list of items; ie, “Here is a list: 1) first item; 2) second item; etc”. It is less confusing to enclose the number (or letters) within both opening and closing parentheses, thus: “(1)”.
Lists without logic. Not all lists admit of a natural ordering principle, but the reader is done a disservice if such an ordering of the items is available but not exploited by the writer. Alphabetical order and chronological order are obvious examples. In a list of fruit, putting all the citrus fruit together seems natural. In one thesis I edited, “pathogens, parasites, predators” seemed to me to be the best ordering of these three items.
Read the manuscript yourself after writing. It is amazing how many people don’t do this. Many an embarrassing mistake can be averted by this simple expedient. When you think you have finished with the manuscript on your computer, print it out, in its entirety. It is too easy to miss errors if you only look at the manuscript on a computer screen.
Have a red pen handy and read your manuscript, at leisure, from beginning to end. How many times you need to read the entire manuscript depends on what you find and on your own ability to be an editor (which involves, inter alia, juggling a multitude of issues at once). What you are looking for includes:–
factual errors (especially numerical errors)
incorrect units (eg, “mg/L” instead of “ng/L”)
inadvertent omissions (eg, “not” or negative prefixes such as “in-” or “un-”)
spelling errors
grammatical errors
unpaired delimiters
ambiguities
lapses in logic
departures from desired formatting (having due regard to the demands of your assessor)
inconsistencies — a huge topic in itself!
incorrect illustrations
incorrect external references (eg, to academic journal articles)
incorrect internal references (eg, to illustrations, tables or other pages)
Mark problematic areas with your red pen. When you think you have finished with the manuscript on paper, do the necessary alterations to the manuscript on your computer, then print it out and read it through again. Hopefully, this time you will be able to read your work with ease and without interruptions occasioned by any of the above problems. If not, back to the computer….
Each of the processes in the following list can be done manually, but it is far more expedient to use a word processor with macro capability that can do the whole lot at once. It is well worth the time to write the macro at the beginning of your course of study in order to have the benefit of its use for all of your written work.
Remove redundant spaces. We distinguish some common instances of this:–
Contiguous spaces. Unless you are using a monospaced font (such as Courier or Monaco) for a specific purpose, you should never string two or more spaces together: if you need more “white space”, use a ruler indent or tab instead. (Older people may recall the exhortation to use two spaces between sentences, but this was in the days of typewriters and is deprecated in these current times of computers with proportional fonts.) Note that it is not enough to search for all occurrences of two adjacent spaces and replace such occurrences with a single space. The process needs to be repeated until the search fails to find any more pairs of juxtaposed spaces. This is a prime example of a situation that yields rapidly to employment of regular expressions in the Find/Replace dialog box.
Spaces preceding tabs.
Spaces following tabs.
Leading paragraph spaces (ie, spaces at the beginning of a paragraph).
Trailing paragraph spaces (ie, spaces at the end of a paragraph).
Remove redundant paragraph returns. You should never string two or more paragraph returns together: if you need more “white space” in this situation, alter the line spacing instead.
Replace stand-alone hyphens (ie, hyphens surrounded by spaces) with em dashes.
Replace list-start hyphens with en dashes.
Change plain quotes to smart quotes.
When nothing more needs to be done, there is one last check to make; viz, that all internal references are in fact correct. For example, altering text on Page 32 may mean that a previous reference to something on Page 65 should now be altered to refer the reader to Page 64 or Page 66 instead. Beware, too, of using expressions such as “this page”, “the previous page” and “the following page”, as adjustments may need to be made.
As always, make sure you have appropriate and reliable backups of your precious manuscript.
Then go and celebrate a job well done!
The Cambridge Guide to English Usage by Pam Peters
The Cambridge Guide to Australian English Usage by Pam Peters
The Mac is not a typewriter or The PC is not a typewriter, both by Robin Williams