Sometimes in the middle of editing a paper, I come across a table, a phrase, or a graphic that, while not wrong per se, forces me to stop and take a good look at it. Something is just off. Usually, what I’m trying to put my finger on is that a particular table or heading or term is out of step with what I have read before in the manuscript. It is, in a word, inconsistent with the pattern or approach laid out earlier by the author.
Issues related to consistency are probably the most common feature of my comments in edited manuscripts. This is partly a function of the process of academic writing in the first place: Producing a paper or a book chapter is usually the end result of several months of time-consuming work that requires a lot of discipline to complete. You may or may not have to coordinate the efforts of multiple people (which comes with its own unique challenges), and even if you don’t, at some point you have likely spent so much time thinking about this particular piece of research that you start to get sick of staring at your own work. Even if you somehow manage to remain as excited at the end of a research project as you were at the beginning, repeated readings of your own work often render you slightly blind to some of your own digressions.
While perfect consistency is probably impossible to fully achieve in an early draft (if it was, I wouldn’t have started this website), there are a couple of general features to keep an eye on as you write that will help speed up the editing process and clear your path to publication.
Formatting
Consistency in formatting is one of the most obvious areas to check, but is ironically fairly easy to miss—likely because researchers and writers tend to focus on refining their content over what amounts to the glorified outline in the background. When inconsistency in formatting appears, it most often affects headings and numbering systems. While one of the benefits of working with an editor is having someone to check your work against the style manuals, to get the most out of it, check the paper once more to make sure that all of your lists and headings are at least internally consistent with each other—it’s one box off the editor’s checklist, and frees up time for me (or whoever you’re working with) to engage with your manuscript in other ways.
Citations
The most frequent issue I see when it comes to citations is the combination of in-text, parenthetical citations with footnotes. This happens particularly often when dealing with the question of how to cite industrial and trade websites within an academic paper. For the most part, these can and should be cited in the exact same way as academic and governmental resources, with the author (or publisher) and date in parentheses and the URLs largely confined to the References section. The major thing to avoid is the use of both footnotes and parenthetical, in-text citations as a way to try to get around the discomfort of citing a less “official” source—the style manuals may have their different idiosyncrasies, but they all agree that these two citation formats should not be mixed!
Term-switching
One of the major temptations for academic authors is to turn to the thesaurus to try to liven up technical prose. This is not always a bad idea, and there are ways to employ the thesaurus that are very effective, but make sure that you are using your technical terms consistently! This is often easiest to slip into when using words like “strategy” that have both a technical (in this case, game theory) definition, and a more colloquial usage. The rule of thumb here is, if you have identified a term for the reader with a specific definition for the purposes of your text, make sure that that is the only word you use when you are discussing that particular concept. If your technical vocabulary is clearly delineated, you will actually create more leeway to craft the language and phrasing around those terms. Your editor will also spend less time trying to understand how you are using your terms, and more time refining the language.
For the most part, these are fairly straightforward suggestions, but building the habit of internal consistency throughout your writing in some very basic ways really does accelerate your path to publication. It reduces the amount of time an editor will spend correcting details, while maximizing the amount of focus they can bring to bear on providing the polish that reviewing committees like to see.
