Laura Handley's Personal Style Sheet
For all points not addressed here, refer to the Chicago Manual of Style, 17th edition; Garner's Modern English Usage; and Wiktionary.
Punctuation
Commas
- Use the serial comma, or I'll stab you with it.
- Set off introductory prepositional or adverbial phrases with a comma, regardless of the phrase's length. (Ex., "In the evening, fireflies fill the air above the field." or "Luckily, we made it to the wedding on time.") This sets an expectation that you can then break to greater effect when pacing requires.
- EXCEPTION TO CHICAGO: When writing numbers longer than four digits, break them up with commas every three digits, counting from the right (ex., "14,440 feet", but "6684 feet").
Ellipses
- When writing with modern word-processing software in a variable-width font, just use the ellipse character. It's fine. The gods of typesetting will not descend from the sky to smite you. When writing in a monospaced font, however, use three periods separated by spaces.
Em and en dashes
- Use em dashes in prose to indicate a sudden change of topic, a flash of insight, or anything more emphatic or spontaneous than the relatively staid parenthetical.
- In website text or other media in which characters beyond the ASCII set are unavailable or require special effort to display, double hyphens are an acceptable substitute for em dashes.
- Use en dashes to separate ranges of numbers or years (ex., "3–6 weeks", "2009–2019") and to join multiword phrases in a compound modifier to the other half of the modifier (ex., "speculative fiction–loving readers").
Hyphens
- Close prefix-word compounds unless doing so would result in adjacent vowels (ex., "pre-existing", "co-organizer"; notable exception "cooperate") or a capital letter in the middle of a word (ex., "non-English").
- Hyphenate word-word compounds unless there is a near-universal consensus not to do so for the compound in question.
- EXCEPTION TO CHICAGO: Hyphenate the two parts of a fraction when written as number-words in running text only when used as a unit modifier. (Ex., "A presidential veto requires a two-thirds majority in both houses of Congress to override." but "He won less than one half of the vote".)
- EXCEPTION TO CHICAGO: Hyphenate phrasal adjectives both when used as unit modifiers (always) and when following the verb (if they look weird without it).
- But don't hyphenate two-word modifiers when the first word ends in "-ly".
Parentheses
- Avoid parentheticals in casual writing. Never use them in dialogue.
- Use nested round brackets rather than that inane (and useless beyond three levels) "hierarchy of brackets" they teach in Algebra I. No one actually uses that. Reserve other types of bracket for other purposes.
Semicolons
- Avoid semicolons in casual writing. Use them in dialogue only if the character speaking is the sort of person who would use semicolons in their speech.
- When listing phrases that contain commas, demarcate the list with semicolons. When listing phrases that contain semicolons—God help you—rephrase or upgrade to a bulleted list.
Special treatment of words
Alphabetization
- When alphabetizing strings that include spaces, count a space as its own character that precedes all others in the alphabetical order.
Boldface
- Use boldface sparingly outside of headings. For emphasis, italics are preferred.
- Punctuation around boldfaced (or italicized) text should be in roman, normal-weight font unless the punctuation is part of the emphasized text.
Capitalization
- Lowercase titles unless they directly precede the bearer's name (ex., "President Pete Felix", but "the Society's president, Pete Felix," and "Pete Felix, president").
- When referring to two geographic features that share a portion of their names, capitalize the shared portion. However, only compress their names in this way if the structure of the names is parallel (ex., "Lakes Washington and Sammamish" and "Gannett and Granite Peaks" but "Mount Mitchell and Magazine Mountain").
- Capitalize the genus of an organism's scientific name but not the species. If the formatting of your medium allows, italicize both names (ex., Kalmia latifolia, the mountain laurel).
Hyperlinks
- Keep the visible text of links to a minimum, preferably a single word. Never include punctuation in this text.
- Avoid mixing visible-URL links with running text.
Italics
- Italicize words for emphasis sparingly, and only when the natural emphasis of the sentence would fall elsewhere.
- Italicize non-English words so that the reader doesn't trip over them.
- Italicize variables in equations.
- Italicize the titles of books, albums, plays and operas, feature films, TV shows, podcasts, graphic novel series, websites, and analogously "whole" or "full-length" works.
Numerals
- Use numerals for n >= 100, with the possible exception of round numbers with short names (ex., "one hundred", "five thousand").
- Don't mix number-words and numerals in the same sentence or when listing quantities meant to be compared. If one such number would be written as a numeral according to the preceding rule, write them all as numerals.
- Percentages should always be expressed as numerals (followed by "percent" in running text or "%" in tables, figures, and other space-sensitive contexts).
Possessives and plurals
- Write possessives of words ending in 's' as follows:
- [word] + 's if the word is singular
- [word] + ' if the word is plural
- Write plurals of foreign-language words as they are constructed in their language, if at all possible. As long as the first such use is clear from the context, readers will understand what you're doing.
Quotation marks
- Use quotation marks to set off text borrowed from other sources, whether those sources be other publications or the mouths of your characters.
- Some also use quotation marks to set off characters' thoughts; I don't, but if you choose to do so, make sure it's clear (through context or dialogue-or-lack-thereof tags) what is and isn't said aloud.
- EXCEPTION TO CHICAGO: Enclose punctuation within quotation marks only when the punctuation applies to the quoted text. (I'm sorry, but the British convention in this regard makes so much more sense than the American one.)
- Letters used as letters are enclosed in single quotes (ex., "the 'P' in the Pan Am logo"). Words used as words are enclosed in double quotes. (Some use italics for this purpose, but my intuition (trained, most likely, by my background in programming) is to use quotes; plus, this way there's no confusing words-used-as-words with emphasis.)
- Any quotation of more than 100 words, 7 sentences, or 2 paragraphs should be set off as a block quote.
- If double quotation marks are used within quoted text, replace them with single quotation marks. If quotation marks are used within the newly single-quoted text, replace them with double quotation marks. And so on.
- Enclose in quotation marks the titles of articles, short stories, tracks, scenes, arias, episodes, individual comic strips, webpages, and other works that are part of a whole.
Superscripts and Subscripts
- When ordinals are written with numerals, leave the "st"/"nd"/"rd"/"th" as normal script.
- Use superscripts for exponents and subscripts for index variables (ex., "ti2").
- In website text or other media in which text formatting is unavailable or requires special effort to integrate, use the caret character to indicate a superscript and the underscore character to indicate a subscript. Precede superscripts with subscripts. If the text in the super- or subscript is more than one word long, enclose it in parentheses.
- (Ex., "t_i^2", as above, and "f(x) = e^(x + iπ)".)
Word List/Usage
(n)oun, (v)erb, (um) unit modifier (an adjective used to modify a noun phrase), (a)djective, (p)hrase
- a lot (is two words)
- acclimate (v), acclimation (n)
- acknowledgment (n; no 'e' after 'dg' in American English)
- affect (v; n in certain specialized contexts)
- As a verb: what one thing does to another. Not to be confused with "effect".
- all right
- is TWO words. The alternative is a noxious blight upon the English language.
- analog (a; represented by a continuously variable physical quantity, as opposed to digital)
- analogue (n; similar or comparable--i.e., analogous--to something else)
- ask (v; never n)
- backcountry (n)
- backward (no 's' in American English)
- cemetery (n; I once lost a spelling bee on this word)
- CMoS (n: abbrev. for "Chicago Manual of Style")
- pronounced "SEE-moss" (as per the majority of the CMoS staff)
- compare
- o + "to" when discussing only similarities; + "with" when discussing differences as well
- compose/comprise
- The parts compose the whole; the whole comprises the parts.
- conceive (v)
- Ideas are “conceived of”, not “conceived”. You don’t give birth to, say, a brilliant plan or a new model of labor regulation.
- a copyedit (n), to copyedit (v), copyediting (n), copyeditor (n)
- data (n)
- should probably be treated as a plural, but to be honest, I doubt I'd notice if you did otherwise
- dialogue (n)
- to dream, dreamt (v)
- duffel bag (n; you would not believe how many times I've seen this misspelled)
- e.g. ("exempli gratia")
- always followed by a comma; best used within a parenthetical
- effect (n, except for all you clever trolls who know how to use it as v)
- As a noun: a thing that happens as a result of something else. Not to be confused with "affect".
- empathy (n; when you have experienced the same thing as someone)
- forward (no 's' in American English)
- health care (n), health-care (um)
- home in on (p; not "hone in on")
- idiosyncrasy (n; only one c; should be easy enough to remember this one is spelled weird)
- i.e. ("in other words")
- always followed by a comma; best used within a parenthetical
- impact (n)
- When tempted to use it as a verb, reword to "affect" or some more specific word.
- indivisible (a)
- indispensable (a)
- invitation (is the noun form, not "invite")
- judgment (n; no 'e' after 'dg' in American English)
- krummholz (n; "bent wood")
- lay (v)
- Not to be confused with "lie". You lie/lay/have lain down; you lay/laid/have laid something else down.
- to leap, leapt (v)
- live stream (n), livestream (v: to present a live stream)
- manmade (a)
- n.b. ("nota bene"; note well)
- non- prefixes closed
- occurrence (n)
- okay (a: "It is okay" or n: "give the okay")
- post- prefixes closed
- pre- prefixes closed
- questionnaire (n)
- re- prefixes closed
- restaurateur (n: one who owns a restaurant; note the absence of an 'n'.)
- ridgeline (n)
- sconce (n; a holder on a wall. Not to be confused with "scone".)
- sing-along (n, um)
- supersede (v)
- to summit, summited (v)
- sympathy (n; when you care for someone but have no idea what they're going through)
- then
- Ignore Jonathan Franzen. It is perfectly acceptable to use "then" as a conjunction between two clauses to establish sequentiality between them: "He went to the store, then cursed when he realized he'd forgotten his wallet." "And", Franzen's suggested replacement, would in this case imply a sloppy simultaneity: "He went to the store and cursed when he realized he'd forgotten his wallet." But for three or more clauses, I recommend "and then": "He went to the store, filled up his cart, and then cursed when he realized he'd forgotten his wallet."
- toward (no 's' in American English)
- treeline (n: the altitude above which trees cannot grow)
- trailhead (n)
- US (n, um, a: abbrev. for "United States")
- acceptable in all uses
- utilize
- is a hideous word; replace with "use" if you want me to have any respect for your prose
- weird (a; spelled in a fittingly rule-breaking way)
- while
- is best restricted to denoting simultaneity; to denote contrast, use "although"