In part 1 I considered why a house style is necessary for a business – for reasons of consistency, brand identity, and economy. Here I will cover a few areas that should be considered based on UK English usage Writing a house style • Abbreviations, acronyms, and contractions: A common style for abbreviations is capital initials without full stops, for example BA and BBC. Full stops are often retained for lower case abbreviations such as e.g., etc., and i.e., although … Continue reading “House style – Part 2”
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Why you need a “house” style By “house” style I mean a writing or editorial style that a company or organization will aim to apply to all the documents and communications it produces. The same can perhaps apply to an individual author who is writing a series of books, guides, or articles. The main reasons why they would want one is for: Consistency – to ensure that all their written output is presented in the same way, for example spelling, … Continue reading “Developing a house style”
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In his 2017 book Camino Island by John Grisham – an undisputed master of crime and legal thrillers – the bookshop-owner Bruce Cable gave the following tips for writing fiction. The character said that he had read over 4000 books and here are Bruce’s pearls of wisdom for successful writing. Tip 1: Avoid prologues where possible Bruce hates these, especially where they leave the reader hanging in suspense until well into the book. The reader has probably forgotten the prologue … Continue reading “Tips for writing fiction from a master thriller writer”
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There are many who consider the colon and semi-colon to be identical punctuation stop marks and use both without discrimination, while others have a strong preference for one mark and have little use for the other. Here I am going to concentrate solely on the use of colons.
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Roman (that is upright type) is the standard text typeface, but for various reasons italic type (that is slanted to the right) is adopted. This is often to indicate some form of departure from normal text for the reader to interpret the word or words in a certain way. Some of the main uses of italic type, or italics, in British English follow.
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Biased language refers to words and phrases that can be considered hurtful, offensive, and prejudiced. Biased language includes expressions or terms that demean or exclude people because of age, ethnicity, marital status, race, religion, politics, sex, sexual orientation, social class, or certain physical or mental traits.
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Biased language refers to words and phrases that can be considered hurtful, offensive, and prejudiced. Biased language includes expressions or terms that demean or exclude people because of age, ethnicity, marital status, race, religion, politics, sex, sexual orientation, social class, or certain physical or mental traits.
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In the first part of this blog I will discuss the occurrence and the effect of using sexist language and in part 2 I will go on to the wider issues of using stereotypes and biased language.
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They say there is a book in each one of us waiting to be written. If that is true it is probably easier for some people than others to turn that into a published book. The first decision to take is about what to write.
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At first glance by the layperson the terms collective nouns and mass nouns might appear to be the same, but there are differences.
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You might wonder what the difference is between hyphens (-) and dashes/rules (*– en, — em dash/rule) that are to be seen in publications. Well, they have distinct functions in punctuation. The main ones are covered below. Hyphens These are used to join two words together (e.g. ‘mother-in-law’, ‘ill-natured child’), called a hard hyphen to indicate a word division at the end of a line, called a soft hyphen to indicate a missing element, called a floating hyphen (e.g. ‘over- … Continue reading “Tips for writers: Knowing how to use hyphens and dashes”
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Author Stephen York Editorial Services - For academic, business and corporate proofreading Posted on 19 Mar 202023 Apr 2021Categories authorship, grammar, house style, punctuation, quotations, spellings, tips for writers, titles, US English, use of capital letters, writing
