On Dit 2010 – Style guide

Hello, writers, copy-editors, and all interested parties! This will hopefully be a concise, not too boring document just outlining some of the standard conventions of written English we’d like you to follow. Essentially, this is to standardise formatting, which makes articles easier and thus less time-consuming for us pushy editors. Making it something of a win-win. I’ll try to cover all of the major points in this, but will undoubtedly miss out a couple of important things. Sorry for that.

Spelling and grammar:

We prefer to use British English spelling as opposed to American English. Ideally, we follow the conventions as laid down by the Oxford English Dictionary. For University of Adelaide students, you automatically have a subscription to the online edition – simply go to http://www.adelaide.edu.au/library/ and find it on the right-hand side. Setting U.K. English as the default language on whatever program you write with also helps. There’s also a Wikipedia (all hail) article on the subject. However, some key differences to remember are:

• Words end in ‘-ise’, not ‘-ize’. You can traumatise someone, but you cannot traumatize anyone (at least not in this country!). Or they can end in ‘-our’ instead of ‘-or’ or ‘-re’ instead or ‘-er’. Use a double ‘l’ in words that end in ‘-ing’, i.e. ‘travelling’.

• “It’s” is a contraction of “it is”. “Its” refers to possession: “a dog and its bone”. This is a really common mistake, but generally thinking about it this way helps.

• They’re, there and their. Messes up so many clever people. “They’re” is a contraction of “they are” – e.g. “they’re over by the bushes, doing really inappropriate things” (say). “There” is essentially the opposite of “here”. And “their” is possessive when referring to a group of people or things.

• More or less the same goes for “your” and “you’re”. “Your” is possessive, while “you’re” is a contraction of ‘you are’.

• Use all caps for an acronym – no full stops. If you are using an acronym several times, the first time you do, use the full term then put the acronym in brackets. From then on, use the acronym. The same applies for time and radio stations (e.g. 3PM and 101.5FM).

• The contraction of mister, missus, and every other title – as well as street titles – perhaps should have a full stop at the end, but we’ll go without. So Mr, Mrs, St, etc are the way we’ll go.

• When writing about decades, do not place an apostrophe before the ‘s’. The apostrophe makes it possessive, so if you write “1950’s”, it is implying that something belongs to the 1950s. If you’re shortening, remember what you’re getting rid of. So it’s ‘50s.

• With numbers, when writing from one to ten, spell them out. Otherwise, use numerals. For large numbers, put a comma where it would be expected (e.g. 50,000).

• There are subtle differences between the terms i.e. (which stands for the Latin id est, and simply means ‘that is’) and e.g. (which stands for exempli gratia and means ‘for example’. I.e. clarifies something, while e.g. is used when you are including something. You also don’t write the acronym in the same way as explained previously, as you can see.

• Proper nouns generally warrant a capital letter, as it is a title. However, no one is hugely amazed by the idea of the internet anymore. So it doesn’t need a capital letter, really. Regardless of what Microsoft Word may say.

• For a lot of proper nouns, whether they begin with a capital depends on the context in which they are addressed. I can ask my dad for something, or I can ask Dad for something. Something that will come up for many of you, given you’re writing for On Dit, is the word University. A similar principle applies. The ‘University of Adelaide’ is a formal address, whereas ‘going to uni’ is not.

• Though it may look silly, British English employs the past participle of verbs in the past tense. So ‘dreamt’, ‘spelt’, ‘learnt’, etc.

• If something belongs to a group of people (or someone/thing ending in an ‘s’), the possessive apostrophe goes at the end, without another ‘s’. So if us editors were writing about something of ours, we’d write editors’.

• Originally we asked people to write ‘per cent’ rather than the % symbol. Then we realised that’s a little dumb. So use a numeral followed by the percentage symbol.

• British English typically uses the perfect present tense, meaning you would write, “I’ve already eaten” rather than “I already ate” (thanks for that one, Wikipedia). But this is a little finicky.

• When writing dates, use day/month/year format (am I the only one really confused by the American format?), and if writing it out, then use “[month] the [day]”. Word will normally turn ‘th’ or ‘nd’ or whatever suffix into a superscript.

• When talking about music or film, use single quotation marks for song names, italics for album/film names, and capital letters (not all caps) for band names. Please also italicise books and magazine titles. Oh, and On Dit itself!

• Don’t capitalise job titles.

• When writing sums of money, it’s $[number] or [number] cents. The same principles of writing out/using numerals apply.

• The Oxford comma (the comma between the penultimate and final items in a list)? Just be consistent.

• When using foreign terms (e.g. en masse, coup d’etat), italicise, please.

Other conventions:

• Importing files into InDesign (our amazing layout program) eradicates pretty much all formatting. So don’t sweat paragraph breaks or indentation, but try and stay as consistent as possible.

• Quotation marks, again, the bane of some! There is no absolute convention regarding which are to be used for speech, but On Dit in 2010 will use double quotation marks for speech, and single marks for quotes within speech. For further nesting, just alternate between them.

• Quotes to indicate decontextualised bits of speech use double quotation marks, and use of irony/sarcasm/etc use single marks.

• If a quote exceeds about three lines, it should be formatted as a block quote. It is a separate paragraph, every line of which is indented. The text should be a size smaller, and even though there should technically not be any quotation marks, we’ll ask for standard usage, please.

• You should begin a new paragraph when moving onto a different thought that bears some relation to what you have written previously. If you have a complete change of tack, then please leave three lines, with three asterisks (***) on the second dividing line. This tells us that you’ve changed topic completely.

• With regards to sub-headings, we’d like only feature-length and longer political pieces to include them.

• Try to use the active voice rather than the passive whenever you can. But it’s not super-important, and Word will pick up on it most of the time anyway.

• Try and stay consistent with the tense you use through an article. We don’t mind which (well, maybe not future tense), but this is something that you’ll notice if you read it through carefully, as inconsistencies in tense really stand out.

• Please, keep the exclamation marks to a minimum. It may have been Hemingway who said that it makes it seem as though you are laughing heartily at your own joke. Looks a bit strange. (!!)

I think that mostly covers it. If you think this isn’t well-written, or that some important things that you’re not sure about have been omitted (I’m sure some have been), then please tell us and it’ll be changed. Hopefully this can be something that you’ll look at occasionally when in doubt of how to format something.

Happy writing,

The 2010 eds.