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The pattern is not universal enough to trust blindly: most universities exclude references and appendices from a word limit, footnotes are genuinely contested, and only the institution's own regulation settles it.
Raising perplexity and burstiness on purpose usually just means writing better: varying sentence length, mixing clause structures, and choosing the word that actually fits instead of the one that merely scans. Concrete before-and-after examples, plus where this stops being craft and starts being a bad idea.
State the null first, then the alternative, one directional or non-directional depending on what the evidence already supports. A worked example carries both statements through one-tailed cost and exactly what rejecting the null does and does not prove.
APA requires the serial comma without exception, and so do Chicago and MLA. Here is what each style guide actually mandates, why the comma exists structurally, and the cases where leaving it out changes what a sentence means.
Four ranked steps for cutting a thesis down to its word limit: filler phrases and nominalizations first, then paragraphs, then sections, with the argument itself never on the list.
GPTZero made perplexity and burstiness famous, then quietly retired both. Here is what its classifier measures now, what a report actually shows, and where the tool says its own limits are.