Advice to Students: Preparation of Your Manuscript

First Steps

When you are getting ready to draft your article, thesis, or dissertation, there are certain things you need to consider:

• Is there a style guide that you need to follow?
• What are the formatting guidelines for your manuscript?
• Is there a document template available for your article, thesis, or dissertation?
• What referencing style do you need to implement?
• Do you have the appropriate referencing style guide?
• Are you going to use a reference manager?

Using a Reference Manager

If you decide to use a reference manager, you need to be aware that your editor will experience a couple of challenges when correcting or amending citations and references in your document. This is because the reference manager inserts formatting codes into the document which cannot be changed easily even when using track changes. Any suggested changes by the editor will most probably be removed by the reference manager once the student opens the edited document. To prevent this, editors must resort to only making comments about suggested citation changes and copying the reference list (or bibliography) without any formatting to a new document in which the editor then uses track changes when amending references. This can then be copied and pasted back into the manuscript of the student after removing the reference list that was compiled using a reference manager. Most editors leave this for students to do themselves.

Drafting Your Manuscript

While writing your manuscript you need to keep the following in mind:

• Write in plain English to make your writing clearer;
  • Use simple, everyday words
  • Keep your sentences short (10–18 words) while varying their length
  • Avoid nouns created from adjectives and verbs (nominalisation), e.g.:
    • applicability from applicable
    • difficulty from difficult
    • intention from intend
    • decision from decide
    • assumption from assume
    • investigation from investigate
    • discussion from discuss
  • Write in the active voice rather than the passive voice, wherever possible
  • Break up the text by using
    • Headings
    • Lists
    • Tables
    • Figures
  • Organise your sentences, paragraphs, sections, and chapters logically to make it easier for your reader to follow and understand you
• Use Word’s spelling and grammar checker (Editor) while writing – you can activate it by going to File - Options - Proofing, and unchecking the Hiding of spelling and grammar errors
• Avoid plagiarism

Final Steps

Many educational institutions now require that students submit their manuscripts to a professional language editor as the last step before submitting the manuscript for marking purposes. Some universities, like the North-West University, even require students to pick an editor from a list of editors who have been accredited by the university’s language services centre. As there is not yet a single official body accrediting editors in South Africa, you must use your own judgement when choosing an editor. You could depend on testimonials from other students. However, to help you make this choice, it would probably be wise to use a recognised body like the Professional Editors' Guild or the South African Translators' Institute to assist you – both have a link on their websites through which you can find an editor.

Invitation

When your supervisor is satisfied that your document is scientifically ready to be submitted for examination purposes, but that it needs language editing before final submission, you will need to find a professional academic language editor to assist you. You are welcome to contact me for a quote. I will do my best to help you to round off your document professionally.