Table of contents
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of some of the pages of this manual.
1. Introduction to editing and proofreading 1
1.1 What does editing and proofreading involve? 1
1.2 Why it’s not easy being an editor 4
1.3 From prescriptivism to descriptivism 6
1.4 Style manuals 7
1.5 Style sheets 10
1.6 Dictionaries 12
2. Marking up 13
2.1 Marking up printed publications 13
2.2 Marking up electronic publications 15
3. Capitalisation 17
3.1 A brief anecdote 17
3.2 People’s names 17
3.3 Government terms 18
3.4 Should I use full capitals? 19
3.5 Headings and titles 20
3.6 A list of times when we use capital letters 21
3.7 When not to use an initial capital 22
4. Shortened forms 24
4.1 Who should I believe? 24
4.2 Abbreviations versus contractions 25
4.3 Symbols and units of measurement 26
4.4 Acronyms 29
4.5 Using fewer acronyms 32
5. Hyphenation 34
5.1 Overview 34
5.2 Hyphenating prefixes 34
5.3 Hyphenating fractions and numbers 35
5.4 Breaking long words with a hyphen 35
5.5 Hyphenating compound nouns 36
5.6 Hyphenating compound adjectives 37
6. Plain English 41
6.1 What is it? 41
6.2 Key 1: Impress them with simplicity 42
6.3 Key 2: Impress them with brevity 50
6.4 Key 3: Impress them with your style 55
6.5 Chapter summary 58
7. Punctuation 59
7.1 Why should I care about punctuation? 59
7.2 Full stops 60
7.3 Colons (:) 62
7.4 Semicolons (;) 65
7.5 Commas 68
7.6 Apostrophes 74
7.7 En dashes and em dashes 78
7.8 Ampersands 81
7.9 Brackets, braces and parentheses 82
7.10 Ellipsis 84
7.11 Question marks and exclamation marks 86
8. Bulleted and numbered lists 87
8.1 How should I format a list? 87
8.2 How should I punctuate a list? 88
8.3 What is parallel structure? 90
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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
