Affect/effect

    • Affect is a verb that means to have an influence on or make a difference in.  Effect is a noun that means a change or response to a specific action.
    • Ex.  To compare the effects of starvation and infection on lipid metabolism, we also studied flies that had been fed only PBS (Hang et al. 2014).
    • Ex.  While sequence differences due to PCR errors may be present in our analysis, this source of error would not be expected to affect the genomes differently…  (Horns et al. 2017)

Apostrophe

    • Avoid using contractions in scientific writing.
    • No apostrophe with plural.
      • Ex.  We present an experimental study of the role of competition in floral divergence using sexes of purple-throated carib hummingbirds (Anthracothorax jugularis) as the pollinators and color morphs of Heliconia caribaea as the plants. (Temeles et al. 2016)
      • NOT …hummingbirds’ as the pollinators…
    • Use an apostrophe for the possessive unless you are using a pronoun (hers, his, theirs).

i.e. and e.g.

These are easy to confuse.  Use i.e. to clarify (in other words)  and e.g. to provide an example.

Examples:

The proportioning of the fruits (i.e., the relative sizes of spore mass, stalk, and disk) also appears to be normal. (Nadin et al. 2000)

To fit a highly curved region, lipids whose effective shapes approximate cones (e.g., diacylglycerol, phosphatidylethanolamine) are better than cylindrical lipids (such as phosphatidylcholine).  (Wang et al. 2013)