E-books: Editing and Proofreading (2010 edition)

Table of contents

Editing and Proofreading

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1.   Introduction  1 
1.1  Why it's not easy being an editor  2
1.2  What is 'correct' English?  3
1.3  Style manuals  6
1.4  Style sheets  8
1.5  Dictionaries  10
1.6  Editing and proofreading checklists  11

2.   Capitalisation  15
2.1  A quick anecdote about typography  16
2.2  People's names  17
2.3  Government terms  18
2.4  Should I use full capitals?  18
2.5  Headings and titles  19
2.6  A list of times when we use an initial capital letter  20
2.7  When not to use an initial capital  21

3.   Shortened forms  23
3.1  Aren't they all called abbreviations?  24
3.2  Abbreviations versus contractions  24
3.3  Symbols and units of measurement  26
3.4  Acronyms  29
3.5  Using fewer acronyms  32

4.   Bulleted and numbered lists  34
4.1  How should I format a list?  35
4.2  How should I punctuate a list?  36
4.3  What is parallel structure?  38
4.4  Choosing between bullets and numbers  39

5.   Punctuation  40
5.1  Why should I care about punctuation?  41
5.2  Full stops  42
5.3  Colons (:)  44
5.4  Semicolons (;)  46
5.5  Commas  49
5.6  Apostrophes  56
5.7  En dashes and em dashes  59
5.8  Ampersands  62
5.9  Brackets, braces and parentheses  63
5.10 Ellipsis  65
5.11 Question marks and exclamation marks  66
5.12 Should I use diacritics?  67

6.   Hyphenation  69
6.1  Overview  70
6.2  Hyphenating prefixes  70
6.3  Hyphenating fractions and numbers  71
6.4  Breaking long words with a hyphen  71
6.5  Hyphenating compound nouns  72
6.6  Hyphenating compound adjectives  73

7.   Writing numbers  77
7.1  Separating groups of digits  78
7.2  Writing spans  78
7.3  Writing dates  78
7.4  Writing times  79
7.5  Writing numbers as words  80

8.   Commonly confused words   83
8.1  'A' or 'an'?  84
8.2  'A historic' or 'an historic'?  84
8.3  'Alternate' or 'alternative'?  84
8.4  'Biannual' or 'biennial'?  85
8.5  'Boldly go' or 'go boldly'?  86
8.6  Can I end a sentence with a preposition?  87
8.7  'If I was ...' or 'If I were ...'?  88
8.8  'In' or 'into'?  89
8.9  'Learnt' or 'learned'?  89
8.10 'Lookup' or 'look up'?  'Backup' or 'back up'?  89
8.11 Do place names always need a capital letter?  90
8.12 'Principal' or 'principle'?  91
8.13 'Program' or 'programme'?  91
8.14 Subject-verb agreement. Woohoo!  92
8.15 'That' or 'which'?  92
8.16 'The team is' or 'the team are'?  93
8.17 'Toward' or 'towards'?  93
8.18 'You and I' or 'you and me'?  94

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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