All posts by uniedit@fixacademicwriting.com

Level of difficulty: Intermediate Your research reports often include long lists of complex items. Sometimes using only commas is insufficient to offset the items. Here is an example: Incorrect: We… Read More →

Level of difficulty: Advanced Editors at Uni-edit often need to correct the use of hyphens during English editing of manuscripts. Correct use of hyphens shows the author’s advanced command of… Read More →

Level of difficulty: Intermediate This is a five-part series about using parallel structures. While editing English manuscripts, Uni-edit editors often need to correct sentences for correct usage of parallel structures…. Read More →

Difficulty: Easy Have you heard of the term lingua franca? It’s a Latin phrase, but you can use it in English. It comes from Latin, and literally means ‘French language’:… Read More →

Difficulty: Medium Contain, consist, compose, constitute, comprise…what these verbs have in common is the Latin root “com-”, which means “to put together”. They describe the relationship of parts to the… Read More →

Difficulty: Advanced How many times have you been told the following: “the past tense denotes an event that happened in the past, while the present perfect tense denotes an event… Read More →

Difficulty: Advanced The Introduction and Literature Review sections of your paper must include background to your research. Authors who publish successfully and publish often know how to use verb tense… Read More →

Difficulty: Easy In an ideal world, research is objective and impartial. The facts are the facts, and the academic author is the objective reporter and analyzer of these facts. In… Read More →

Difficulty: Medium Quick quiz: There are 21 words in the sentence below. Can you reduce it by 4 words while retaining the same meaning? “There are several reports that suggest… Read More →

Difficulty: Easy Many Uni-edit customers are from Chinese & Japanese language backgrounds. Our customers sometimes translate the characters “一方” or “一方面” into English as “on the other hand” and “besides”… Read More →

Difficulty: Intermediate How many times have you seen the word ‘significant’ used in a scientific paper either with statistical results or to discuss the importance of something? Did you know… Read More →

Difficulty: Easy One of our customers asked us about a specific request from their target journal to nominate peer reviewers for their manuscript when submitting it to a journal. My… Read More →

Difficulty: Intermediate Uni-edit English Editors are accustomed to seeing the self-referential phrase “the present study”, which an author uses in a paper to refer to itself or accompanying research. It’s… Read More →

Difficulty: Intermediate Groundbreaking research pioneers new directions by identifying gaps in the literature, and by forming new hypotheses to reconcile contradictory findings. You can’t achieve this goal without knowing the… Read More →

Difficulty: Intermediate These days, it’s almost impossible to read an academic paper without encountering acronyms. The intention is to make papers easier to read, and to create new lingo for… Read More →