Table of contents
Click on the following image to see thumbnails
of some of the pages of this manual.
1. Introduction 1
1.1 What do editors and proofreaders do? 1
1.2 Why it's not easy being an editor 4
1.3 From prescriptivism to descriptivism 6
1.4 Style manuals 7
1.5 Style sheets 10
1.6 Dictionaries 12
2. Marking up 13
2.1 Marking up printed publications 13
2.2 Marking up electronic publications 15
3. Capitalisation 17
3.1 A brief anecdote 17
3.2 When should I use initial capitals? 17
3.3 Should I use full capitals? 19
4. Shortened forms 24
4.1 Who should I believe? 24
4.2 Abbreviations versus contractions 25
4.3 Symbols 26
4.4 Acronyms 29
4.5 Using fewer acronyms 32
5. Hyphenation 35
5.1 Overview 35
5.2 Hyphenating prefixes 35
5.3 Hyphenating fractions and numbers 36
5.4 Breaking long words with a hyphen 37
5.5 Hyphenating compound nouns 37
5.6 Hyphenating compound adjectives 38
6. Choosing legible fonts 42
6.1 Why is the right font important? 42
6.2 Which fonts are most legible? 44
7. Heading hierarchies 49
7.1 Why are headings important? 49
7.2 What are heading hierarchies? 49
7.3 How should I format headings? 53
8. Plain English 55
8.1 What is it? 55
8.2 Use one word, not several 56
8.3 Avoid pompous, pretentious writing 59
8.4 Eliminate buzzwords and unnecessary jargon 61
8.5 Use short sentences 64
8.6 Use short paragraphs 65
8.7 Use the active voice 67
8.8 Tone: personal pronouns and contractions 68
8.9 Latin has to go: avoiding i.e. and e.g. 71
9. Punctuation 72
9.1 Why should I care about punctuation? 72
9.2 Full stops 73
9.3 Colons (:) 75
9.4 Semicolons (;) 78
9.5 Commas 80
9.6 Apostrophes 87
9.7 En dashes and em dashes 90
9.8 Brackets, braces and parentheses 93
9.9 Ellipsis 96
9.10 Question marks and exclamation marks 97
10. Bulleted and numbered lists 99
10.1 How should I format a list? 99
10.2 How should I punctuate a list? 101
10.3 What is parallel structure? 103
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TESTIMONIAL
"I enjoyed reading your book and will certainly recommend it to colleagues interested in writing skills. I think it very lucidly gives an overview of everything anybody needs to know really about the skill.
I especially like its practical approach, e.g. the very down-to-earth tips on what to do (or not, as the case might be)."
Hans Mol
