An example of why hyphens are necessary

The following is an excerpt from an email sent to staff at the University of Manchester. As part of the University’s commitment to creating change in gender equality across the University we are running a half day unconscious bias training session focussed on recruitment and promotion. The following is how it should have been punctuated […]

The importance of proper punctuation

From Steven Colbert’s Twitter feed @StephenAtHome and #igotthetweetslikegrassley.

Dump the tilde

I am an Assistant Editor at the Electronic Journal of Severe Storms Meteorology. As we have no paid staff, we depend upon authors to send us manuscripts that are near-ready to publish. The rest of the work we do ourselves, including much of the layout, technical and copy editing, and Web pages. For all that, […]

Writing Advice from William Safire

Dave Jorgensen sent me this wonderful piece of writing advice from author, columnist, and presidential speechwriter William Safire. 1. No sentence fragments. 2. It behooves us to avoid archaisms. 3. Also, avoid awkward or affected alliteration. 4. Don’t use no double negatives. 5. If I’ve told you once, I’ve told you a thousand times, “Resist […]

For Those About To Punctuate (Correctly), We Salute You: The Best Links If You Need Help With Punctuation

Punctuation Made Simple (Gary Olson, Illinois State Unversity) National Punctuation Day Guide to Punctuation (Larry Trask, University of Sussex) The Tongue and Quill [PDF] (U.S. Air Force)

A heretical parenthetical thought

George Bryan sent me this article from the 9 November 2010 issue of Eos. Robock, A., 2010: Parentheses are (are not) for references and clarification (saving space). Eos, 91 (45), p. 419. Prof. Robock makes a strong case that sentences like the following are not clear, and that the added space in writing the sentence […]

“Unnecessary” Quotation Marks

I think people use quotation marks too often in scientific manuscripts. Be brave. Boldly define your term and use it sans quotation marks. It’s good to know that someone else thinks like me. Let me introduce you to The “Blog” of “Unnecessary” Quotation Marks.

Did you know?

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 […]