Valerie Monckton, Author at Valerie Monckton

An image of a person sitting in front of a computer, confused about hyphens, en dashes, and em dashes

How to Use Hyphens and Dashes in Medicine and Life Sciences

How can something so menial as a horizontal line cause so many headaches? If you’ve ever struggled with dashes and hyphens, you’ve come to the right place. In this article, we’ll discuss the difference between hyphens, en dashes, and em dashes; how to add them to your document from your keyboard; and some handy tricks to fix incorrect dash usage without losing your sanity.

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A laboratory worker placing coloured liquid into a vial with a dropper.

12 Tips to Simplify Science Communication

How many times have you re-read sentences in academic papers, flipped back and forth through reports to understand their conclusions, or decided that you couldn’t cite a paper because you simply couldn’t decode what it was saying? Academic and scientific writing is infamously hard to read.

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A drawn character sitting in front of a computer, sweating and gripping their hands in their hair.

What Level of Editing Do You Need?

Searching for the right editor can be a tricky task, made all the more difficult by the many different types of editing that exist.

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Has AI Replaced Editors?

AI tools have exploded in popularity, leading many to question the value of working with an editor when software like Grammarly and ChatGPT might edit their work at a fraction of the

Has AI Replaced Editors? Read More »

Research Impact & Writing Quality

The printing press, the telephone, and the internet represent some of humanity’s greatest inventions. They each amplified our ability to communicate, accelerating the exchange of knowledge and ideas. Today, communication is a fundamental part of research: researchers write reports, papers, theses, and more.

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Picture description: An image of two chickens, Marie and Louise. These Cornish Cross chicks were my experimental subjects before they became residents of The Browns’ Microsanctuary.

Writing Consciously About Animals

Welfare or rights, advocate or activist—the language you choose to describe your work on behalf of nonhuman animals (hereafter referred to as animals) determines who finds, identifies with, and supports your work. Increasingly, popular media has honed in on the expansion of language to describe traditionally animal-derived food products like vegan cheese, plant-based burgers, and

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