Better Writing

These are some of the questions that I have often have when writing a document. Someone I know was kind enough to share some of the writing tips from his style guide.

• Single space after a PERIOD
• Periods and commas are always inside the closing QUOTATION MARKS (e.g. he said, “I love eating Chocolate.” Or “Sometimes I just feel lazy,” Peter remarked.).
• Use a HYPHEN (-) for hyphenated words and use the EM DASH (—) for interruptions in the sentence/side notes. The em dash is an extended hyphen. It can be found by pressing shift + option and hyphen symbol on a Mac. There should be a space on both sides of the em dash.

RULES FOR NUMBERS:

• • Spell out whole numbers below 10 and use figures for 10 and above.
• • Numbers at the beginning of a sentence are spelled out.
• • A year/era in full doesn’t have an apostrophe before the s (e.g. 1930s).
• • A year/era in short has a backward apostrophe at the beginning (e.g. ’30s).