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About Liz Dexter

Book blog is at http://www.librofulltime.wordpress.com Writer, proofreader, editor, transcriber. Also runner, gym-goer, volunteer and BookCrosser! My married name is Liz Dexter but my maiden name and the name on the books I write is Liz Broomfield.

Lightning, lightening or lighting?

07 Dec

Several people have mentioned this trio to me, so it’s time to set it all out and explain it …

Lighting is the system or arrangement of lights, in a home or a theatre or film studio or wherever there are lights, or the effect that this arrangement has – “The lighting in the scene gives a feeling of doom”.

Lightening means becoming lighter in weight – “He was lightening the balloon by throwing out the ballast, and we went up, up and away!” or paler in colour – “She’s been lightening her hair again”. It also  has a technical, gynaecological meaning to do with wombs: you can look that up yourselves, as I think that’s one of those terms that you will know if you need to know it.

Lightning is the visual presentation of the electrical discharge between clouds, or between clouds and objects, during a thunderstorm. As a modifier, it also means very quick, linking of course to the very quick nature of lightning itself, as in, “His lightning reflexes meant he caught the pint glass before it hit the floor”.

You can find more troublesome pairs here and the index to them all so far is here.

 
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Posted by on December 7, 2012 in Errors, Language use, Troublesome pairs, Writing

 

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Bullet points – grammar and punctuation

28 Nov

Last week we talked about when to use bullet points and how to personalise them. This week, we’re going to have a look at the actual language of bullet points, including top tips on making them easy to understand for the reader. There are two parts to this: word forms / grammar and punctuation.

Punctuation in bullet points

Over recent years there has been a shift towards less punctuation and “cleaner” looking documents. I remember this being called “open” punctuation, and it’s the difference between typing an address as:

1, Avenue Gardens,

Brighton,

BN1 1AA.

and

1 Avenue Gardens

Brighton

BN1 1AA

Of course there is a place for punctuation, but it can get a bit messy looking, and I’m all for clean lines as long as you don’t forget your semi colons within normal runs of text!

So, here are some things not to do. We never introduce a list in a sentence with a semi colon, and we don’t introduce a bulleted or numbered list with one, either.

It used to be the case that we included semi colons and even “and”s at the end of every line. But I think that does look old-fashioned and cluttered nowadays …

Regarding the full stop at the end of the last bullet point … well, the jury is out on that one. It’s one of those style choices that don’t have a specific rule. I’ve checked in my New Oxford Style Manual and my Oxford Guide to Plain English: the former doesn’t talk about the punctuation much at all, and the latter has some general standards to consider following.

Here are my suggestions:

  • If the bullet points come in the middle of a sentence, and it is still clear when you read that sentence even though it’s got bullets in the middle, you can
    • start each bullet point with a lower case letter
    • put a full stop at the end.
  • If the bullet points are very short and don’t form a sentence, like this:
    • Start with a capital
    • Don’t add full stops
    • Use full stops sparingly
  • It is fine to add a full stop at the end of each bullet if the bullet points are long and include:
    • More than one line of text which therefore forms a solid block when you look at it on the page.
    • More than one sentence. It would look odd to have a full stop there and not here.

In summary:

But the single most important thing to do is KEEP IT CONSISTENT within each bulleted list! If you use capital letters or lower case letters to start each bullet, keep them the same throughout. If you end the first bullet with a full stop, end each of them with a full stop.

But of course, you can use different styles for different lists, as the context demands, although I’d be wary of having wildly different ones very close together, as it can look messy.

And this point on keeping it consistent brings me on to …

Grammar in bullet points

We insert bullet points into a text to make it more easy for the reader to understand. This means that the grammar within the bullet points should be consistent, so the reader doesn’t end up scratching their head and going over and over the same bit of text, trying to work it out.

Have a look at this example, and you’ll see what I mean:

Even if the reader can understand the basic sense of this, the uncomfortable disconnect between the different grammatical forms bring the reader’s attention to the form of the text and not the meaning of its content. And that’s not what good, clear writing should do. However, this is one of the most common mistakes I find in the text I proofread and edit. Especially if the bulleted list is long, the writer will lose track part way through and start going all inconsistent.

This is what that list above should look like:

Nice and tidy: everything following the same structure.

The grammar of bullet points must be consistent and matching so that the reader is not confused. It’s a different matter with the punctuation, which is, when it comes down to it, more of a matter of choice. Personally, I prefer capital letters and no full stop in my bullet points, which is why, if you’re my client and your bullet point punctuation is a little inconsistent, you’ll find me using that as standard!

So now you know all about how to insert and customise bulleted and numbered lists, and the grammar and punctuation to use with them! I hope you have found this helpful.

This is part of my series on how to avoid time-consuming “short cuts” and use Word in the right way to maximise your time and improve the look of your documents. Find all the short cuts here …

Do let me know if this has helped you – and do share with the buttons at the bottom of this article.

 
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Posted by on November 28, 2012 in Language use, New skills, Short cuts, Writing

 

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Homonym, homophone or homograph?

26 Nov

A timely post, as I was discussing this, with examples, at home yesterday evening. Yes, that’s how we like to have fun here at Libro Towers: a bit of etymology of an evening …

We’ve already had one pair where I explain the difference between homo and hetero, so we know that the prefix “homo” will essentially introduce a word that’s all about two things being the same. But what happens when those words themselves all look horribly similar?

These three are quite similar-looking technical words used in English literature and linguistics. It is important to know the difference if you are working in these fields.

Homonyms have the same spelling or pronunciation but different meanings (the word comes from the Greek – having the same name), for example, pole and Pole, pear and pare, but also bass and bass. The homonym is the main class of words, divided into homophones and homographs.

Homophones have the same pronunciation but different meanings, origins or spellings, new and knew, beat and beet, fair and fare.

Homographs have the same spelling but different meanings, with either different pronunciations or the same pronunciation – for example bass (the deep singer) and bass (the fish), or cleave (separate) and cleave (join together).

You can find more troublesome pairs here and the index to them all so far is here.

 
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Posted by on November 26, 2012 in Errors, Language use, Troublesome pairs, Writing

 

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Annex or annexe?

23 Nov

I’ve been working on a document that described a number of buildings with annexes, and I have to admit that I had to look this up, just to check. Well, to be honest, I look up a lot of things to check them, as I’d always rather get it right, oddly enough (one of these days I’ll write a post about a word that I’ve always thought is a word, but doesn’t actually exist …)

So, to annex is a verb, never has an e on the end, and means to add as an extra part or to appropriate territory. I can’t give an example of the latter without getting all political, but you could have a set of tables and a document they refer to, and decide to annex the tables to the document rather than present them separately. That’s an acceptable, discrete verb form, not one that’s been oddly made out of a noun (like “to inbox” – ugh) as far as I know.

An annexe, the noun, is an addition to a document or building. Now, I have to admit that I thought the difference lay here, and that the e was only added for a building. But all of my good old Oxford sources say no, it’s used for both. So, “The table was added as Annexe 1 to our document”; “Coffee will be served in the annexe to the church”.

Or, you can just skip the e there altogether. But you know me: I like to maintain different forms of words to preserve the variety of our language. So I say verb: no e; noun: add that e. Add it as an annexe, if you will!

You can find more troublesome pairs here and the index to them all so far is here.

 
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Posted by on November 23, 2012 in Errors, Language use, Troublesome pairs, Writing

 

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Bullet points – how and when to use them

21 Nov

It’s Word Tips time and today I’m going to talk about bullet points – why we use them and how to use and format them. Next week, I’m going to treat you to some tips about how the language and punctuation of bullet pointed text works. But for now …

Why do we use bullet points?

Bullet points help to make what you’re saying more clear. They break up blocks of text into tidy chunks so the reader can take in what you’re saying. They present lists in a clear format so people can see it’s a list. They emphasise points you want to emphasise. They show the organisation of things. In short:

  • They’re useful
  • They’re tidy
  • They’re good at emphasising things
  • They make sure the reader knows this is a list

How do I use bullet points in Word?

In Word, you want to be in the Home Tab. Then, look at the Paragraph section and you’ll find a set of useful little buttons. One has a list of dots, one has a list of numbers, one has an indenting list of numbers, and two have paragraphs and arrows:

These are the buttons you need to make your bullet pointed lists.

So, here’s a plain list without any bullet points. To make a list bulleted, you need to highlight the areas you need to change. So in this example, we want to leave the first line alone and highlight the other ones:

Once we have the lines highlighted, we can click on the bullets button (just in the middle of the button for the time being) to make the highlighted lines into bullet points:

You can do the same but hit the number button to the right of the bullets button – now we get a numbered list:

How do I create sub-bullet points?

What if you want nested bullet points in sub-categories? That’s fine – put your list into bullets, then select just the line you want to change and click on the Increase Indent key to move it along one. You’ll see the bullet point itself (or the number) change when you do this.

There’s another way to do this (of course there is!) – get your cursor just before the first letter of the first word of the line you want to indent and hit the Tab key on your keyboard. You will get the same effect.

How do I customise my bullets and numbering?

You may not like the standard bullet points you’re given by Word. That’s fine, because you can customise them.

The bullet and number button each have a tiny arrow on the right-hand side of the button. Try clicking on the one on the bullet button …

… and you’ll get a choice of different bullet markers you can use. If you click on Define New Bullet, you can even upload your own images to use as bullet points: useful if you’re creating a document that needs to be on brand with the rest of your brand identity, for example.

You can do this with the numbers, too, allowing you to choose between letters, Arabic numbers and Roman numerals:

Again, you can define your own new number format if you want to.

Customising the list style

To go just that little bit deeper into customisation, you can also fully customise how the sub-bullets work and even set a new Style for this document or all future documents.

To do this, we use the Multilevel List button. This one’s a bit of a swizz, I think – it gives you a tiny arrow on the right, but it doesn’t actually matter where on the button you click; you will still get the same menu.

So this gives you the chance to choose between different multi-level list formats and to define your own.

If you select Define New Mulitlevel List you will be given a new set of options. Choose this if you just want to change one list in your document.

If you want to define a style for all of the lists in your document, or a new List Style to use in all documents forever, choose Define New List Style.

Then you can go ahead and crate a new list style that will appear in your Styles on your Home tab, and can be used for lists in just this document, or documents from now on.

We’ve learned how to set up and customise bulleted and numbered lists.

Next week, we’ll look at the text you write in lists and how to make sure that works clearly and appropriately.

This is part of my series on how to avoid time-consuming “short cuts” and use Word in the right way to maximise your time and improve the look of your documents. Find all the short cuts here …

Do let me know if this has helped you – and do share with the buttons at the bottom of this article.

 
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Posted by on November 21, 2012 in Copyediting, Errors, New skills, Short cuts, Word, Writing

 

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Invite or invitation?

16 Nov

I have come across this rather more times than I’d like recently. If anyone remembers the short-lived Libro character, Ranting Ron, who turned out to be too negative for this nice, friendly, supportive blog, he would have been ranting about this one ..

Invite is a verb. It means to ask someone to go somewhere or do something, and can be informal (“she invited me to go for a coffee after yoga”) or formal (“Mr and Mrs Perkins invite you to the wedding of their daughter, Polly”). It can also be used to refer to eliciting a response of some kind – “I would like to invite questions from the audience”. Full stop.

Invitation is a noun. It’s a written or verbal request inviting someone to go somewhere or do something. It’s the bit of card that is used to do this, which Mr and Mrs Perkins will send to you when they want to invite you to their daughter’s wedding. Invitation is the noun to invite’s verb.

Now, I have to admit that the esteemed Oxford dictionaries do admit that there is an Informal use of invite to mean invitation. But I don’t think we need that, do we? Let’s keep the distinction and keep it all nice. OK?

You can find more troublesome pairs here and the index to them all so far is here.

 
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Posted by on November 16, 2012 in Errors, Language use, Troublesome pairs, Writing

 

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Ocular or oscular

12 Nov

Is it the eyes or is it the mouth? I have to admit that this is a bit of a cheeky one, inspired by the ramblings of a group of vision scientists who were discussing vision and kissing … but what’s the point of having even a fairly serious work blog if you can’t be cheeky occasionally. So this one is dedicated to Matt, Arthur, Dicle, Matthew, Aidan and their chums …

Ocular means of or related to the eyes or vision.

Oscular, in its “humorous” sense (according to the Oxford dictionaries, whose sense of humour may be slightly ponderous) refers to kissing. In its zoological sense, it means something related to the osculum. And the osculum, dear readers, is a large aperture in a sponge from which water is expelled (from Latin os, mouth: diminutive, osculum, little mouth). Now, if that hasn’t killed the romance, I don’t know what will …

You can find more troublesome pairs here and the index to them all so far is here.

 
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Posted by on November 12, 2012 in Errors, Language use, Troublesome pairs, Writing

 

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Changing the language in Word comment boxes

07 Nov

I have already published a detailed post on how to customise your comment boxes/balloons. This issue came up for me the other day, and I wanted to note down some quick instructions. Please note these instructions are for Word 2010 and upwards for Windows and may not work in other versions.

Why are my comment balloons in a different language?

In my case, I was running a final spell-check over a document when I suddenly realised that my comment balloons were in Australian English (I realised this when the spell-checker switched over to Australian English while taking exception to a word I had not, in fact, mis-typed).

Why would this be? Well, the formatting of the comment balloons comes under its own Style, separate from normal text, so at some stage this document, or the computer it came from, or the template the author was using, had come to have Australian English as the comment box language.

How did I get it back to UK English?

How do I change the comment balloon language?

Follow the normal steps for updating the comment balloon style, so get to the styles menu by

  • Pressing Control + Alt + Shift + s all at the same time
  • Making sure you’re in the Home tab and click on the little tiny arrow at the bottom right of the Styles menu

This gives you the Styles dialogue box.

Using either of these methods, you will bring up the Styles dialogue box.

Click on the rightmost button: Manage Styles to bring up the next box: Manage Styles. To get to Comment Balloons: click on the down arrow to change As Recommended to Alphabetical:

Once you’ve got the list into alphabetical order, find Comment text, and then click on the Modify button. 

Click the Format button and choose Language …

And change the language:

And then all the OK buttons to get back.

You can also choose whether this change applies only to this document, or to all documents based on this template, and add it to your Quick Styles list if you want:

Press the OK button, and carry on pressing OK buttons until you get back to your document. Now your comment box language will be whatever you asked it to be!

Why not take a look at these related topics, which should help you further?

Customising comments balloons

What to do if your comment boxes go tiny in Word

What to do if your comment boxes start running from right to left

Customising Track Changes

This is part of my series on how to avoid time-consuming “short cuts” and use Word in the right way to maximise your time and improve the look of your documents. Find all the short cuts here …

Do let me know if this has helped you, saved your bacon, etc. – and do share with the buttons at the bottom of this article.

 
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Posted by on November 7, 2012 in Copyediting, New skills, Students, Word, Writing

 

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A week-long series over on the Other Blog …

05 Nov

It’s three-tops cold!

As the weather is getting colder and I settle in to my 11th month of full-time self-employment, I’m running a series of blog posts over on the Libro Full Time blog about what homeworkers wear. I’m musing about standards, keeping up appearances, changing from corporate wear to home wear, and whether appearances matter when you’re hiring me for my brain, over the next week, as well as sharing what I’m wearing and encouraging other homeworkers to do so, too.

Do pop over and say hello; you can sign up to subscribe or add the blog to your reader if you haven’t done already, or just dip in and out.

Watch this space for more Word tips on this blog later in the week … Otherwise, I’ll see you over there!

 
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Posted by on November 5, 2012 in Blogging

 

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Keeping it formal – your academic writing

31 Oct

I’ve worked with many different academic texts, written by native and non-native speakers alike. Many issues are the same all over the world and crop up in anything from an undergraduate essay to a journal article. One of the major ones is making sure the language and style used is appropriate to the academic environment.

Here are my top tips for keeping your academic writing formal and appropriate.

No contractions

Contractions are not suitable for academic writing. That’s right, don’t do what you wouldn’t see in a textbook.

  • Change don’t to do not
  • Change there’s to there is
  • Change isn’t to is not

The only exception to this (and to all of these rules, actually) is if you’re quoting, either the literature or the direct speech of your interview participants / writing in entries to your questionnaires. Then, go ahead and use what someone else has said (but see the section on tidiness below).

Colloquialisms and slang – not cool, man

It’s very easy to be tempted to write as you speak. This includes those contractions that we’ve just talked about, of course. The classic one I see here is “lots of”; you just need to upgrade that one a little, and the same happens with “really”.

  • Instead of “Lots of researchers say this is wrong”, try “Many researchers say this is wrong”.
  • Instead of “This happened in lots of places”, try “This happened in a large number of cases”
  • Instead of “Interviewee A appeared to be really upset about this”, try “Interviewee A appeared to be very upset about this”

If you’re tempted further into slang, then think twice. Is there a way to make this sound less informal? What word would you use if you were talking in a seminar, or to your grandparents?

There is no place for the exclamation mark!

This one is more about objectivity than anything else. If you’re writing an academic text, you need not to appear partisan (even if you are) and your language needs to be very cool, calm, collected and academically rigorous. An exclamation mark is a surefire way to allow your own personal feelings to creep in.

Contrast these two examples:

  • When they were claiming expenses, senior managers would often claim for an extra meal that they did not order or eat!
  • When they were claiming expenses, senior managers would often claim for an extra meal they did not order or eat.

In the first one, we can’t help reading a value judgement – this is a bad thing, right? Well, it might be, but your job is to report the facts and then draw conclusions from them, backed up with the theory from your literature review.

Me, me, me (I)

It can be quite hard to work your own practice into the text in an appropriately formal way. It’s not usually acceptable to use the word “I” and you will need to find a way to work around this. It’s a good idea to check local practice here – some institutions favour “we”, some go for “the researcher”, and some won’t let anything personal through at all, and you’ll have to do some rather acrobatic writing to twist it all round into the passive tense.

Please note that this one can change depending on the academic discipline within which you’re working, and the agreed common practice of your institution. So check this one with your supervisor or the style guide you may have been given at the start of your course or contract, and adhere to the rules you’re given there above my rules. If you are not given any guidance, then use my suggestions to keep it as formal as possible. It’s worse to be under dressed than to be over dressed!

Here are some examples of the options:

  • I found that not all of the respondents answered every question
  • We found that not all of the respondents answered every question
  • The researcher found that not all of the respondents answered every question
  • It was found that not all of the respondents answered every question
  • Or, keeping it simple: Not all of the respondents answered every question

Eliminate sloppiness

It’s oh-so-easy to let sloppiness and inconsistency creep in, especially when you’re writing a long document with lots of sections. These are a few of the major culprits

  • Not checking the spelling of names in your references. Spell-checker won’t notice this and if you go too far wrong, your proofreader might think you’re talking about two different authors.
  • Not being consistent in your headings styles and numbering (read this article and the ones it’s linked to if you need help setting this up to be automatic)
  • Not being consistent with how you lay out new paragraphs and indented quotations (those big ones that you put in a special paragraph all on their own)
  • Not being consistent with your -ise- and -ize- spellings (organisation vs. organization)
  • Not being consistent with your capitalisation – there are rules for this which I’ll treat on the blog at some stage, but there are often choices to be made, too
  • Not being consistent with hyphenation – similar to capitalisation
  • Using abbreviations without spelling them out the first time

The editor’s solution for this? Use a style sheet. If there’s something you need to use consistently, note down your preferred way of doing it on a separate Word document, and keep it open to refer to as you need.

With abbreviations, note down each one and when you first use it (chapter and section will be enough), Keep this updated if you’re working on the chapters in an unusual order, and make sure the first instance is the one that has the words spelled out.

Keep it tidy

This is related to sloppiness, but a bit more specific. This is all about keeping the document looking nice, so how it looks doesn’t distract from what it says. I find two main culprits here:

  • Putting everything into direct quotations from interview respondents. I often find a quotation like this: “… and um the thing the thing is that, it’s not going to … work … at … all”. A much neater way to put this, which is going to get across the meaning a lot more clearly, would be “And the thing is, that it’s not going to [pause] work at all”.
  • Emphasis overload. If you’re indenting a quotation and putting it in italics, you don’t need to put quotation marks around it, too – it’s pretty obvious that it’s a quotation. If it’s a quotation in the text, just quotation marks, no need for italics except for emphasis. If you’ve got a heading, bold, underline and italics plus a colon at the end might just be too much

As a basic rule, keep it simple, keep it neat and tidy: don’t distract from the reader’s experience of the content of your writing.

Reference, reference, reference

I cover this in detail in another article, but it’s worth reminding you of these rules …

  • If you state an opinion that hasn’t come directly from your brain as an original thought, reference it: “Many people think the sky is green (Jones, 2010; Smith, 2012)”
  • If you talk about something that’s come out of your research, reference it and make sure you label your respondents: “One teacher thought this was rubbish and said so (Interviewee A2)”
  • If you state your own opinion, still back it up: “When reading the responses from the students, it struck the researcher that this needed looking into”; “As we have seen from the teacher respondents, not everyone agreed”. “We found that, contrary to Green (2011) our results suggest pupils do respect their teachers”

——-

I hope you’ve found these pointers useful. If you’re a student or a supervisor and you can suggest any more hints and tips, do please use the comments below to share them! And you might find my other resources for students and resources for Word users helpful – do take a look.

 
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Posted by on October 31, 2012 in New skills, proofreading, Students, Word, Writing

 

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