Table of contents
Click on the following image to see thumbnails
of some of the pages of this manual.
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
