COMMUNICATION IN THE BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES
Department of Biology

REVIEWING MANUSCRIPTS

Before submitting any written work, whether it is to an instructor, a publisher, or a granting agency, the writing must be critically reviewed multiple times. This type of review obviously includes scans for spelling, grammar, and punctuation mistakes. However, and possibly more importantly, the content of the work and the logic of the science presented must also be critiqued. Below is an outline of what to look for when you are critiquing your own work or reviewing someone else's.NOTE: If you are having someone else review your work, it is to your own benefit (i.e., your grade will be higher, your paper will be published, your grant will be funded) that the draft you give them be YOUR BEST WORK and not a rough draft.

General Tips
  • Read the paper out loud to yourself and listen for problems while reading.

    •  
  • Begin revising well in advance of the deadline (which means the first draft must be written even sooner!). You will do a better job if you break for at least a few hours (or even a day or two) in between drafts.

    •  
  • Make revisions on a paper copy. It is nearly impossible to revise effectively without seeing the entire manuscript.

    •  
  • Do not throw away early drafts. Sometimes sections of an earlier draft can be used in a later version.

    •  
  • When working on the computer, save often to prevent the heartache and misery of completely losing an hour or more of hard work.

    •  
  • Keep more than one copy of the file(s) and update both. For example, have a copy on the hard drive and a disk or have a copy on each of two disks. 

    •  
  • Proofreading for spelling, grammar, and punctuation is important to support your credibility as an author. It is very difficult to proofread your own work because you tend to automatically read what you expect to read. You must force yourself to look at every word, number, space, and line in the text as well as in the figures and tables. Ideally, do this at least three times for your final draft, taking a break in between each session. Take advantage of your word processor to find some things, but realize that it won't find every mistake; that is your job. 
Checking for General Content
  • Be sure that all of the information in your paper supports the main idea or hypothesis and that this is obvious to the reader.

    •  
  • Remove material that is not relevant to the main objective even if it took you a long time to develop that material.

    •  
  • Be sure that the organization of the points that are made in the paper is logical and leads the readers to your main conclusions clearly and smoothly.

    •  
  • There should be clear transitions made between paragraphs, ideas, and topics.

    •  
  • Check that the style is consistent throughout the paper since you probably wrote different sections of the paper at different times.

    •  
  • Be sure that what your introduction states as the purpose of the work is consistent with what you actually conclude.

    •  
  • Realize that revising will involve more than just reorganizing paragraphs but will require a large amount of re-writing and editing to improve the clarity and value of the final product. 
Checking Paragraphs
  • Each paragraph needs to begin with a topic sentence. Each additional sentence must be relevant to that topic sentence.

    •  
  • Paragraphs are usually four to six sentences. Avoid paragraphs that are only one sentence; these are not useful in science writing because they simply represent undeveloped ideas. 

    •  
  • Break up extremely long paragraphs into a few smaller ones if they contain more than one main idea.

    •  
  • Use transition words ("Thus...", "Therefore...", "Because of this...") that link sentences together into a coherent package.

    •  
  • There should be clear transitions between paragraphs that link the end of one paragraph with the beginning of the next. 
Checking Sentences
  • Vary the structure and length of your sentences to keep the reader's interest and prevent the work from sounding choppy or wordy.

    •  
  • Check a dictionary and/or thesaurus to be sure that you're using words appropriately (see also "The Dirty Dozen").

    •  
  • Do not quote directly from a source even if you cite it. Although other disciplines use this type of writing quite frequently, it is done very rarely in science. Always paraphrase ideas and cite them, being careful not to plagiarize.

    •  
  • Remove any slang or jargon by using appropriate terminology (e.g., instead of "ran a gel", write "performed gel electrophoresis").

    •  
  • Omit unnecessary words and extraneous phrases.

    •  
  • Use past tense to report results of your own research and present tense to report the results of others. 

Home
 

Copyright © 2001, the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse and the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin.