Many of these 12 common punctuation mistakes don’t matter much in informal writing, and very few people apart from your proofreader will care about them. But just be aware of these common errors when you’re writing a formal business letter, investor report, or any other document that must be error free. Read More
As a freelance nonfiction editor, I work on many financial, scientific, and technical documents, and number formatting is something I always pay particular attention to. In this post, I’ll discuss this topic so that you’re better prepared to read, write, or edit documents in which numbers play a crucial role.
Numbers with multiple digits and decimals are written in different ways across the globe. For example, number formatting in most European countries is not the same as in the United States.
If you’ve ever received an invoice from a contractor in the EU, you might have noticed that some numbers are not written the same way as in America. Instead of a dot between euros and cents, you might have seen a comma. And instead of a comma as a thousands separator, you might have seen a space or a dot.
Why is the European number format different from the American? In this post I’ll answer this question and discuss the decimal point vs. decimal comma and the thousands separator to help you understand how number formatting in Europe differs from that in the U.S. Read More
A client asked me, “Should a Latin expression be hyphenated when I use it as an adjective? For example, should status quo be hyphenated?”
No. In general, there’s no need to hyphenate Latin phrases used in English. To know when to hyphenate and when not to hyphenate Latin words used in English, you need to first understand hyphenation rules. Read More
A team member asked me: “When you use quotes, where does the period go: before or after the quotation marks? How about the other punctuation marks, do they go inside or outside quotes?”
The rules of punctuation with quotation marks depend on whether you follow the American or British convention. Here’s a more detailed explanation of these conventions, as well as examples of punctuation with quotation marks in a sentence. Read More
