Appositional “or”
The conjunction “or” can be used not only to indicate two or more alternatives but also to indicate synonymous or equivalent expressions. When used for the latter purpose, “or” can be translated as...
View ArticleServed as
It’s difficult to find a book on scientific writing that doesn’t inveigh against weak verbs and nominalizations, and in previous posts, I’ve suggested ways to find them in your papers and eliminate...
View ArticleTop five posts of 2012
Is improving your scientific writing among your goals for the new year? If so, you might start by revisiting the five most-read posts on The Scientist’s English for 2012: 1. Adverb placement 2....
View ArticleWhat’s the difference between “extensively” and “intensively”?
What’s the difference between studying a subject extensively and studying it intensively, between doing extensive research and intensive research? It seems like a simple enough question, one that could...
View Article“As a result” as a conjunctive adverbial phrase
“As a result” is often used as a conjunctive adverbial phrase to indicate cause-and-effect relationships; in this sense, it is synonymous with “therefore,” “hence,” “consequently,” “as a consequence,”...
View Article“A” or “An” with abbreviations? It depends.
Scientific papers tend to contain lots of abbreviations—acronyms, initialisms,* gene symbols and protein designations, element and isotope symbols, chemical formulas, and so on—and authors sometimes...
View Article“Concerning” as an adjective
When you submit a paper to a scientific journal, you want the editor and the referees to focus on the science not the writing, which should transmit your meaning without attracting attention to...
View ArticlePodcasts, MOOCs, and other online educational resources for science editors
My postgraduate training was rather narrowly focused on synthetic organic chemistry, but in my 20 years as a science editor, I’ve often been called upon to edit material outside this specific area of...
View ArticleDon’t omit needed words
In a review article I was reading recently to get some background information for an editing job, I encountered a sentence that I couldn’t decipher even after having read it several times. It serves as...
View ArticleHow to describe removal of protecting groups
In synthetic chemistry, protecting groups (also sometimes referred to as protective groups) are used to mask reactive functional groups, either to prevent them from being transformed by a given set of...
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