Stilly River Sage, you didn't add that the style editing continues long after the degree. Different technical journals have different formats. My colleagues and I often would format our papers for a particular journal to save on rewrite. The bibliography was a real pain in the ass, making certain that every colon, semicolon, comma and period was in the right place. And did the journal require italics or quotation marks? Some journals used the style manual from hell; getting the paper into print sometimes was more time-consuming than the research itself.