CORRESPONDENCE Translating incoming letters. If a letter is in an editable electronic format, simply overtype the original, though you need not translate irrelevant detail. However, if the letter cannot be overtyped, use a simple layout such as follows: Letter from: … Read More
LISTS Use automatic numbering wherever possible, since it is much easier to amend a list if the numbers are automatically adjusted. For the list items themselves, take care that each is a grammatically correct continuation of the introduction to the … Read More
ADJECTIVES AND ADVERBS Biannual/biennial. ‘Biannual’ means twice a year and ‘biennial’ means every two years, but the terms are often confused. If the meaning is not clear from the context, use alternatives such as ‘twice-yearly’ or ‘two-yearly’ or clarify what … Read More
FOREIGN WORDS AND PHRASES IN ENGLISH TEXT Foreign words and phrases used in an English text should be italicised (no inverted commas) and should have the appropriate accents, e.g. inter alia, raison d’être. Exceptions: words and phrases now in common … Read More
ABBREVIATIONS General. The prime consideration when using abbreviations should be to help the reader. First, then, they should be easily understood. So when an abbreviation that may not be familiar to readers first occurs, it is best to write out … Read More
General. In deciding whether to write numbers in words or figures, the first consideration should be consistency within a passage. As a general rule write low numbers (up to nine inclusive) in words and larger numbers (10 and above) in … Read More
Possessive of nouns. The possessive form of nouns is marked by an apostrophe followed by an -s. After the plural ending ‘s’, however, the possessive -s is omitted: the owner’s car women’s rights footballers’ earnings one month’s / four months’ … Read More
DASHES Dashes vs hyphens. Most users of word processors do not distinguish between dashes and hyphens, using hyphens to represent both short dashes (‘en’ dashes = –) and long dashes (‘em’ dashes = —) commonly used in typeset documents. However, … Read More
Items in a series Here, the comma may be considered to stand for a missing ‘and’ or ‘or’. John mowed the lawn, Mary did the cooking and Frank lazed around. He came, saw and conquered. The committee considered sugar, beef … Read More
General. Compounds may be written as two or more separate words, with hyphen(s), or as a single word. There is a tendency for compounds to develop into single words when they come to be used more frequently: data base, data-base, … Read More
