Honorary president: Judith Butcher Honorary vice-president: David Crystal OBE

Editing Matters style guide

This style guide also applies to the SfEP website.

Reference books (in descending order of authority)

• Butcher's Copy-editing, 4th edition
• Dictionary: any Oxford dictionary, ideally one published since 1998
• New Hart's Rules, 2005
• New Oxford Dictionary for Writers and Editors, 2005
• Chicago Manual of Style 14th edition
• Cambridge (CBE) Manual for Scientific Style and Format (perhaps not necessary for us all).

Abbreviations/contractions

• No full points with any abbreviations or contraction, with the following exceptions:
  • e.g.
  • i.e.
  • no.
• Days and months: in Diary, first three letters, no stop: Mon Tue Wed Jan Feb Mar, etc. – otherwise in full.
• Pages and columns: col3 (no space), p4 (no space), pp4–6 (no space) – only where there is no room to spell out column, page, pages.
• [sic]: italic in square brackets,
• tel (telephone).

Ages

An 8-year-old (not eight-year-old), a 21-year-old man.

Articles and case

• the SfEP magazine, the June magazine – lower-case 'm'
• the editor, the chair, the vice-chair (see Council titles below)
• upper-case S for the Society (when referring to SfEP) – leave out 'the' unless it grates
• national meeting
• the council
• associates, corporate associates
• Accreditation/Registration, the Accreditation board
• by-laws
• (SfEP) conference – upper-case ‘C’ only when used in full title
• the Directory (i.e., upper-case ‘D’ and in italics), but the directory subcommittee
• membership list
• PDF, but when naming a file: filename.pdf

Council titles

Accreditation director, chair, company secretary, conference director, finance director, internet director, membership liaison director, membership secretary, PR director, publications director, recruitment director, training director (assistant training director).

Editorial inserts

In square brackets, roman, ending with spaced en-dash and italic Ed – for example: [That's enough punctuation – Ed].

Internet

• In URLs, omit 'http://' if URL starts with www
• HTML
• internet, website, the web
• Break long URLs in the following descending order of desirability:
  • after a forward slash
  • after a full point
  • after an underscore
  • after a hyphen.

If there is an http:// prefix, breaking after the second slash would be a good place, too.

Italic or quotation?

• If it is a quotation from something or speech, use quotes:

  – He was definitely being 'economical with the truth'.

• If a word or phrase is being defined or discussed, use italics:

  – When we talk about being economical with the truth, we mean …

• Italics are used for emphasis as well:

  – He was being economical with the truth.

Lists (numbered or bulleted)

• If full sentences: initial caps and full points at ends of items
• If not full sentences: no initial caps and no punctuation at ends of items, except the final one, which is followed by a full stop.

Miscellaneous

• Parentheses: normally round, but square for authorial alterations or insertions in quoted matter
• an sae/an SfEP member
• 'Included/enclosed with [not 'in'] this issue'
• Company moves and developments: as it is not possible to determine whether someone is an editorial assistant or (the) Editorial Assistant, etc, we use lower case for all jobs in this section.
• Contractions are OK; decide whether to use them according to the tone of the piece and the voice of the author.
• Use the following irregular verbs: burnt, dreamt, leant, learnt, smelt, spelt, spilt and spoilt.
• Colons after italic (or bold) list headings/definitions should also be italic (bold), not roman.

Names and addresses

If on one line, then: Mrs AM Smith, 3 Primrose Street, Bedford MK40 2DL (i.e., no comma between town and postcode). Apparently Royal M ail doesn’t want county names any more.

Newspapers and journals

If the publication concerned uses upper-case 'T' and italicizes (as does The Bookseller), then so do we. The Guardian is the Guardian (as in their own style guide).

Number (i.e., singular/plural)

• The general public does/has/thinks
• The council has
• Routledge has/is/does, etc
• May & Baker has/is/does.

Numbers

• Spell out one to ten, others in figures; it is OK to mix numbers and words in the same sentence.
• 1000, 10,000
• per cent rather than %
• percentages always expressed as a number (with per cent): e.g., 2 per cent, 22 per cent.
• decimal points on the line
• no stops after units of measurement, but space before: e.g., 60 kg, 4 cm, 15 hp, 48 Mb.

See also Telephone numbers and Time and dates below

Punctuation

Abbreviations

• et al/i.e./e.g. – all roman, but use 'for example' for preference, with comma, semi-colon or colon as appropriate before and comma afterwards.

Commas

• Generally there are four types of comma:
  • Listing: red, white and blue (NB no final/serial comma unless sense demands it)
  • Gapping: I was afraid of worms; Tim, of spiders; and Tara, of bats.
  • Bracketing: The book, published this year, was considered the most original new writing this decade. (NB used particularly after ‘which’)
  • Joining: Proofreading marks should be clear and unmistakeable, and you should use a red pen when you mark them. (NB use a ‘joining’ comma where the sentence demands it; if the sentence is short, you don't have to use one).
• Commas after introductory clauses ('In 1998, he decided to stand for the committee'): in general, we use these. But the rule is not hard and fast – be consistent within an article.
• No comma before ‘too’ (as a general rule).
• Comma after ‘however’ at the beginning of sentence (unless in sense of ‘However wet the weather, I'm still going’). Comma before and after ‘however’ as well, if in middle of sentence: ‘I think, however, that it will rain before evening.’

Dashes

• spaced en-rules generally, but unspaced in page, time and date spans.

Ellipses

• three spaced-out (. . .) points with space before and after (except when inside quotation marks, which should be closed up to the first or last point) – never a fourth point.

Quotation marks

• single inverted commas, double within
• full point inside closing quotes if the quotation is a complete sentence starting with a capital letter; otherwise full point outside closing quote

• before quotes – Penguin Guide to Punctuation says (pages 97–8):

  A sentence containing a quotation is punctuated exactly like any other sentence apart from the addition of the quotation marks. You should not insert additional punctuation marks into the sentence merely to warn the reader that a quotation is coming up . . . the presence of quotation marks does not remove the necessity of using other punctuation which is required for independent reasons (e.g. colons introducing an explanation or bracketing commas, etc).

• exclamation or question marks that belong to the quote, no matter what the length of it, stay inside the quotation marks
• capitalization of first word of a quote if the quote is a full sentence or appears to be a full sentence.

Semi-colons

• Join two sentences (i.e., both halves of the sentence must have finite verbs). Use as a glorified listing comma only when it is necessary to avoid ambiguity.

References

Use Harvard system.

Reviews

• When using abbreviated form of title of book being reviewed, use italics with initial caps: 'the Guide', 'the Handbook', etc.

• Punctuation in review headings is 'By [author], [publisher], [place], [date].' (i.e., three commas then full point) followed by '[number of pages], [price].' (comma then full point). Note that ISBNs are on a new line and should have spaces, not hyphens.

  For example:
  Oxford Guide to Word Games
  By Tony Augarde, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2003. 294 pp, £14.99.
  ISBN 0 19 866264 5

Spelling (see also Word list below)

• Our style is -ize endings.

Telephone numbers

• In brackets after name and address:
  • Smith . . . MK40 2DL (020 7242 7905)
  • Smith . . . MK40 2DL (tel/fax 020 7242 7905)
  • Smith . . . MK40 2DL (tel 020 7242 7905; fax 0171 242 8546).
• Overseas numbers: begin with plus sign and country code – for example: +49 4106 3797 (a Hamburg number), not 01049 4106 3797.

Times and dates

• 4.00 am, 6.15 pm, 9.05 am (i.e., space but no stops)
• for 24-hour clock, no stops: 1700, 2339 (but only use 24-hour clock where context demands it)
• en-dash for time spans: e.g., 3.00–5.15 pm, 1440–1500
• 8 April 1995

Word list

• 3" disk (i.e., straight inch marks, not curly)
• acknowledgement
• adviser
• back-up (n)
• by-laws
• CD-ROM
• co-ordinate/co-operate
• copy-editor
• corporate associates (not corporate members)
• cost-effective
• council (after September 2003; before that, ‘committee’, or appropriate wording to indicate that this is what the SfEP council was then called)
• desktop publishing (DTP)
• dispatch
• EDline
• email
• encyclopedia (but Pears Cyclopaedia)
• flyer
• freelance (not freelancer)
• indexes as plural of index
• in-house editor; work in house
• judgement
• LANGline
• mark-up (n) and mark up (v) (but 'mark up tools' when referring to Adobe products)
• nonetheless
• OK (no full points) but 'to okay' for the verb
• ongoing
• online books, get online (always one word now)
• on-screen editor; work on screen
• onto: one word, but two words when clearly in the sense of continued direction: 'He climbed onto the table', 'We dined and then went on to the nightclub'
• no one (two words)
• proofreader
• program (computer program)
• programme (theatre, music, etc)
• set-up (noun)
• SfEPAnnounce
• SfEPLegal
• SfEPLine
• SfEPMedical
• subeditor
• turnaround (n)
• under way (always two words)
• website (now one word and lc)
• word processor/word processing (two words, no hyphen), but:
  • word-processing software/program
• work flow
• worthwhile (always one word now)

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