"Publish and prosper" is a series of posts about tips for researchers whose first language is not English but who submit papers to journals published in English. The series touches upon not only writing (spelling, grammar, punctuation, usage, and style) but everything else relevant to publishing research papers that journal editors wish their authors knew.

1. Contractions are a special kind of abbreviation

2. In writing names of people along with their titles, do you write Mr Smith or Mr. Smith? Dr Tanaka or Dr. Tanaka? Omitting the full stop or the dot (or the period) at the end of these abbreviations is standard in the UK [1,2,3] but not so common in USA . Here are some more examples: Dept for Department, Ltd for Limited, Edn for edition, Sr for Senior and Jr for Junior.

3. All the above are examples of contractions—a special category of abbreviations in which the shortened version retains the first letter and the last letter of the fully spelt-out version in their respective positions. As mentioned earlier, the standard UK practice in such cases is to skip the final dot that normally marks a term as an abbreviation , as in Prof. for professor and Pvt. for private.

4. The convention has one exception, however : if the shortened version happens to be a word in its own right, the dot is re-introduced to prevent the shortened version being read as a normal word instead of as an abbreviation of another word. That is why it is common to write no. for number (numero), col. for colonel, and coy. for company. Lastly, the dot is also used to distinguish between two identical forms: it is retained in St. for street but skipped in St for saint [3, p. 172].

5. References: [1] The Economist Style Guide , 10th edn (2010), p. 153. London: Profile Books. 264 pp. [2] Butcher J, Drake C, and Leach M. 2006. Butcher's Copy-editing: the Cambridge handbook for editors, copy-editors and proofreaders , 4th edn, p. 118. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 543 pp. [3] New Hart's Rules: The handbook of style for writers and editors (2005), p. 203. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 432 pp.

6. Connect with us on: http://www.facebook.com/Editage http://www.twitter.com/Editage http://www.linkedin.com/company/cactus-communications Connect http://blog.editage.com