Did you know?

February 10, 2010 Filed under Blog, Writing

That “Web” as in “Web page” is capitalized?
That “chapter 5” and “section 3.2” are generally not capitalized, but “Figure 9” and “Table 1” are?
That Microsoft Word flags “a climatology” and “a cloud” as grammatically incorrect? [I don’t know why. Does anyone out there?]
That “native English–speaking colleague” uses an en dash, but “English-speaking colleague” uses a hyphen?
That the citation for a direct quotation should appear inside the quote marks: “…without regard to race, gender, religious belief, ethnic origin, citizenship, or political philosophy of the author(s) (American Geophysical Union 2006).”
That there is a space between the temperature and the Kelvin unit (K), as in “273 K”, but no space between the temperature and the degrees C (or F) symbol, as in “0.6°C”.

One Response to “Did you know?”

Prof. David M. Schultz says:

Thursday, 25 February 2010 at 18:02

I think I just figured out why “a climatology” is flagged by a green underline in Word for grammar. If you replace “a climatology” with “a climatological study,” you get no underlining. If you replace “a climatology” with “a meteorology,” then you get underlining. Clearly, Word must recognize that a subject to be studied (ending in -ology) does not need an “a” in front of it.