| 
  • If you are citizen of an European Union member nation, you may not use this service unless you are at least 16 years old.

  • You already know Dokkio is an AI-powered assistant to organize & manage your digital files & messages. Very soon, Dokkio will support Outlook as well as One Drive. Check it out today!

View
 

CopyEdit Style Guide

Page history last edited by Nina Simon 14 years, 2 months ago

In general, please edit for grammar, spelling, punctuation, and general sentence readability. If you don't understand a sentence or think it needs to be changed, mark it (with Track Changes).

 

I am following the Chicago Manual of Style for grammatical, punctuation, and capitalization of this book. You can access the Manual here using:

username: museumtwo 

password: museumtwo

 

HOWEVER, I am taking an unorthodox approach to footnotes. I am taking a "friendly footnote" approach. This means I am not providing exhaustive bibliographic information in the notes. This information will be available on the website list of references. The format for footnotes is an imperative sentence "Read the blog post..." or "Watch the video..." that includes basic short-form footnote information. If there is a footnote that you feel is inconsistent or lacking in necessary information, please mark it.

 

Please note that the following is not included in this draft:

  • images, tables, and captions
  • table of contents and index
  • acknowledgements
  • selected bibliography

 

 

Other consistency points for copy-editors:

  • One space after periods, not two.
  • One space after colons, not two.
  • BULLETS should take the following form:
    • For short bullets, the first letter is capitalized, no period at the end of the statement
    • For multi-sentence bullets, use periods.
    • For multi-sentence bullets in which words or phrases are emphasized, the emphasis should be italics.
  • Exhibitions are italicized, as are projects and educational programs.
  • Quotations should have angled quote marks, not straight ones.
  • References to content elsewhere in the book is presented in-line in the following format: (see page XX)
  • The "front line" is a place. When it comes to staff members, they are "front-line" staff, not "floor staff" or "front line staff"
  • "Staff" is a collective noun. When talking about individuals, use "staff members"
  • "Web" is capitalized when talking about "the Web." On the other hand, use "websites" and "web pages," not "Web sites" and "Web pages." (Following Oxford English Dictionary, not Chicago Manual of Style here)      
  • One space before each new sentence, not two.
  • No space between the end of a sentence and the footnote reference.
  • "She" or "he" (I alternate), but not "he/she" and always use the same gender for a person referred to across a sentence or paragraph.
  • Sticky notes instead of "post-its." Sticky notes may be referred to in subsequent references as "stickees" or "notes."
  • Block quotes do not require quotation marks. The reference for a block quote should appear at the end of the quote, not at the end of the sentence that precedes it.
  • Em dashes, not double-hyphens.
  • Skill building is two words.

 

Please add any of your questions or requests for style clarity on this page or in the comments.

Comments (11)

Matthew Andress said

at 12:02 pm on Jan 22, 2010

RE: Quotations should have angled quote marks, not straight ones. -- I don't know if this is a font issue, but there are instances where an apostrophe appears as a straight line (like an accent mark) or like a curved line (like a comma). Which should it be?

Matthew Andress said

at 12:05 pm on Jan 22, 2010

Does it matter if there is a space after the period at the end of a paragraph?

Susan E Edwards said

at 12:38 pm on Jan 22, 2010

Technologyl terms - since some of these have no "standards" yet, I thought I would share my findings so we can discuss...
- Wi-Fi - per Cambridge. There is much debate about whether this is even a word. Another spelling I found (not in a dictionary) is WiFi. Not in Webster at all. Chicago is mute. NYT uses Wi-Fi
- Podcast is a verb, pod cast is a noun - perWebster
- e-mail - per Webster. This is actually accepted, in my mind - with the hyphen. But I am seeing it without in this manuscript, so am checking

I'll add more as I find them.

Matthew Andress said

at 2:16 pm on Jan 22, 2010

What is the best way to change -- to an em dash? I am afraid that Word will insert the wrong font. I can copy and paste another one from elsewhere in the documment I suppose. Anyone else having trouble with this?

Susan E Edwards said

at 5:27 pm on Jan 22, 2010

here are 3 ways:
1. if you have the option turned on, you can type two hyphens after a character and when you type the next letter, it will change to an em-dash (no spaces between dash and words).
2. Use the menus: Insert >> Symbol >> Special Characters - them choose the em-dash
3. On a Mac, Command+Option+negative sign on the Number pad (I am on a laptop though and I don't have a number pad - you'd need a keyboard for this)

Nina Simon said

at 5:21 am on Jan 23, 2010

Susan, thanks for looking those up. I think usage is a better guide than the dictionary to some of these because they are still being accepted. But I agree on e-mail, disagree on podcast (think it should be one word per iTunes), Wi-Fi sounds good. Thanks for checking these out...

Also, another way to make the em dash change is with Format >> AutoFormat, but use it carefully.

Susan E Edwards said

at 10:29 am on Jan 23, 2010

Following iTunes is cool for podcast - I didn't think to look there!

Here are two more tech terms I found in my chapter:
meet-up, meetup, or Meetup?
The word “Meetup” capped is proprietary to meetup.com. I can’t find “meetup” in any style guide or dictionary, which implies to me that we should hyphenate “meet-up” to create a compound noun. Meetup.com always caps this term. I found very few references to this in online newspapers where they weren't referring to official Meetups through meetup.com. I recommend either "meetup" or "meet-up". The latter is more appealing to me because readers who have never heard of this term will be less confused about it if they see the hyphen, which implies the two words were stuck together intentionally.

YouTube – no spaces

Nina Simon said

at 11:35 am on Jan 23, 2010

Great - let's use meet-up per your recommendation! And I totally agree about YouTube. You have a very techy chapter - the others have far less than #3.

tikkaw said

at 7:45 pm on Jan 25, 2010

Hi Nina,

Just to clarify, unspaced em dashes? (note on a PC, numbers locked, 'alt 0151' on the number pad will also an em dash. 'alt 0150' produces an en dash)

Also, do you want us to delete extraneous spaces before para marks and extra empty paragraphs. It looks like the style tagging is consistent so none of these is necessary and will just clog up the typesetting. Thanks!

tikkaw said

at 8:27 pm on Jan 25, 2010

and ... en dashes between number spans? Eg, pp 83-84 takes an en?

Nina Simon said

at 4:47 am on Jan 26, 2010

Tikka - yes on all accounts. uspaced em dashes, en dashes between number spans, and remove all extra carriage returns and extra spaces. Thanks!

You don't have permission to comment on this page.