Take a random scientific paper and look at Figure 3, without looking at the rest of the text. Can you understand what experiment each panel shows? Do you know what all the acronyms, different colored fonts, and symbols mean? Do you know what analysis was performed, how many replicates (biological and technical) the authors conducted, […] Read more...

In the post on spaces, we mentioned that you can use Google Ngram to find the most-common usage for words. Here are more ways the search function in your word processor, and a good search engine can help: Defining acronyms/abbreviations/initialisms on first occurrence and using them consistently throughout the text. We suggest you spell out [&helli Read more...

I’m sorry, were you bored with italics? Good—that’s why busy plant biologists hire editors like us to take care of the picky details. Let’s talk about something that is arguably more interesting—in fact, it has started Twitter feuds. That’s right: spaces (or the lack thereof)! Do put a space between the number and the unit, […] Read more...