Editing Skills Assessment

In the following excerpt, use a small circle to mark where in the text you find grammatical errors or other mistakes that do not align with the style expectations below.

Numerals

• Use numerals for numbers 10 and larger, spelling out one through nine.
• Use numerals with quantifiers, such as million or billion.
  (e.g., 2 million)

Italics

• Avoid italics whenever possible.

Hyphens & Dashes

– Hyphen

• Hyphens are for connecting words that function as one word.
  (e.g., much-needed, high-profile, mass-produced, Spanish-speaking)

– En Dash

• Use an en dash between ranges of numbers.
• Use for a negative (minus) symbol.
• Join names in titles with an en dash.
  (e.g., Myers–Briggs, Wisconsin–Madison)

— Em Dash

• For sudden insertions or breaks in a sentence.
• Denotes interruptions when placed at the end of a sentence.
• Use before attribution at the end of a quote block.

Quotation Marks “x”

• Always use quotation marks in pairs.
• Be careful not to use apostrophes as “single” quotation marks unless it is a nested set of quotation marks inside another.
  (e.g., “Yeah, I’d ‘love’ to go,” replied Mark sarcastically.)

Lists

• Authors should be using the list formatting function to create bulleted and numbered lists. When done correctly, lists are indented and numbered with periods or marked with bullets.
• Use bulleted list formatting to emphasize a sequence outside of a sentence.
• Use numbered list formatting for any sequence or list where order or quantity is important. Numbers in ordered lists are followed by a period.

Title Case

• Use title case in headings and for titles of chapters and sections, especially when punctuation is not present.
  (e.g., An Introduction to Plants and Fungi)
• Title case is not necessary when the heading or title is a question or sentence with punctuation at the end, such as an exclamation.

Parentheses (x), Brackets [x], & Braces {x}

• Parentheses are for including additional material that has no grammatical relationship to the surrounding text.
• When new acronyms are introduced for the first time, spell them out completely in parentheses.
  (e.g., MSU (Michigan State University) is a land-grant university.)
• Use square brackets inside parentheses rather than a second set of parentheses.
• Braces are not interchangeable with parentheses or brackets.