When writing a manuscript make sure to check the following items before you send it to Anthony, another lab member, or a journal.

Text, general

• Read The Science of Scientific Writing and apply its principles to your manuscript
• Read The elements of style and apply its principles to your manuscript. You can borrow the book from Anthony.

Text, specific

• Always spell check, every revision
• Whenever possible, ask a native English speaker colleague to proof-read and correct your paper.
• Use past tense for what you did or observed. Use present tense for general truths, or atemporal facts.
• Reduce each sentence as much as you can.
• Try to reduce the use of passive voice (“we aligned sequences”, not “sequences were aligned”)
• Remove all the occurrences of the word \”not\”. For example, \”The dataset does not include that specific feature\” should be become \”The experiment excludes that specific feature\”.
• Spell out all abbreviations on first use
• Cite any software used on first use
• Units should use siunitx on TeX or a space elsewhere (“500 kbp”, not “500kbp”)
• References to figures should usually first describe something you want to show and then have the figure reference in parentheses. (“Highway fatalities strongly anticorrelate with imports of lemons from Mexico (Figure 1).”, not “Figure 1 shows the correlation of highway fatalities and imports of Mexican lemons.”)
• List all authors and provide their affiliations
• Provide page numbers

Figures

• Label all axes
• Make all text large enough to read
• Use colorblind-safe colors as much as possible (for example, some palettes from http://colorbrewer2.org/)
• Use the same font for labels etc. in your figures (important if you generate them in different programs)
• Refer to all figures in text, appearing in order of numbering

Figure captions

• First sentence in figure caption is the title of the figure. Bold it.

Tables

• Refer to all tables in text, appearing in order of numbering

Author contributions

• Provide author contributions using the CRediT taxonomy to describe contributions.

Bibliography

• Check that any journal articles have volume and starting page at the minimum. An article-specific identifier is a page, not a number, which is reserved for issue within a volume.
• Check any capitalization or italicization that should occur in article titles. This is a frequent problem with: species names, in vitro/in vivo, gene names

Acknowledgment

This checklist has been adapted from the list from Michael Hoffman’s lab.