Music. Hi, my name is Kerry Thurber and I'm a quality control editor at Research Square. Today, I will be talking about how and when to use "respectively" in a sentence. Researchers often record data from multiple time points, concentrations, treatments, temperatures, etc. Comparisons of these data often take the form of parallel lists, two lists with the same number of items. The items in the first list correspond to items in the second list in order. The sentence often ends with the adverb "respectively". In English, "respectively" means in precisely the order given sequentially. You can think of a parallel list as a table in sentence form. For example, "The average growth rate was 2-4 grams per minute in the 20, 25, and 30 degree treatments, respectively." However, if the list is not parallel, then we do not use "respectively". A longer way to write the previous sentence would be, "The average growth rate was 2 grams per minute for the 20-degree treatment, 4 grams per minute for the 25-degree treatment, and 8 grams per minute for the 30-degree treatment." In this case, "respectively" is not used as there is only one paired list rather than two parallel lists. Another example of when "respectively" would not be used is, "The average growth rate was 2, 4, and 8 grams per minute for the 20 to 30 degree treatments." In this case, we may infer that the 2 and 8 grams per minute rates match the 20 and 30 degree treatments, but this list is not parallel because we do not know the temperature value that matches with the 4 gram per minute rate. Punctuation is also important to remember with "respectively". If "respectively" is at the end of the sentence, then it will be preceded by a comma. If...