Category Archives: Pro Tip Tuesday

Following on from last week, here are three more little things to pay attention to when you’re preparing to submit a manuscript for publication: 1. Smart quotes vs. straight quotes In your word processor, you probably have the “smart quotes” setting turned on, which produces quotation marks and apostrophes that are usually curved the rightContinue reading “Pro Tip Tuesday #22: Three more little things to check for consistency”

When your writing is being prepared for publication, a copyeditor will (hopefully!) catch any formatting mistakes or inconsistencies, but it’s worth making sure that the manuscript you submit is as clean as possible—that allows the copyeditor to focus on other issues, and it should reduce the number of errors that will inevitably slip through. HereContinue reading “Pro Tip Tuesday #21: Three little things to check for consistency”

In Word, there are two ways to indent the first line of a paragraph: 1) apply first-line indentation in the paragraph settings; 2) hit the tab key. I often see authors using these interchangeably, switching back and forth within the same manuscript. But what you might not have realized is that, while they look theContinue reading “Pro Tip Tuesday #20: Paragraph indents”

Because of the amount of time it takes to go from a first draft—or even a submitted manuscript—to a published scholarly article or book, the time frame in which you’re writing isn’t the same as the one in which your work ultimately appears in print, and readers might encounter it at any point between thenContinue reading “Pro Tip Tuesday #19: Publication takes a long time and your readers are in the future”

When I’m editing footnotes or bibliographies, I often see authors including access dates for all online sources, even those that are unlikely to change over time (such as an article in an online scholarly journal or a major newspaper). The Chicago Manual (14.12) is here to free you from this burden! An access date—that is,Continue reading “Pro Tip Tuesday #18: You (probably) don’t need as many access dates as you think”

When I’m line editing a manuscript, one of my top priorities is making sure the relationships between sentences are logical and clear to the reader. If you set up one idea in Sentence A and then introduce another one in Sentence B, the reader should be able to tell how they relate to each other—isContinue reading “Pro Tip Tuesday #17: Switchtrack words”

When I’m doing a line edit, one thing I pay attention to is how often the author uses pairs or sets of terms connected by slashes, which academic writers seem to love doing. One reason for avoiding this whenever possible is just that it can momentarily trip up the reader—how exactly do you pronounce “power/legitimacy”Continue reading “Pro Tip Tuesday #16: Use slashes responsibly”

If your book or article will be published with endnotes rather than footnotes, you can make the reader’s experience of flipping back and forth less annoying by making sure discursive notes are worded specifically enough to make sense in isolation. Avoid using “this,” “it,” “he,” etc., to refer back to something in the main text;Continue reading “Pro Tip Tuesday #15: Make endnotes clear without context”

Up through the 16th edition of the Chicago Manual of Style, the standard way to cite the same source in multiple consecutive footnotes was to use the abbreviation ibid. (16:14.29). With the 17th edition, the preferred method is now to use regular shortened citations for all subsequent citations of a work, though the title canContinue reading “Pro Tip Tuesday #14: The problem with ibid.”

When writing an italicized title, word, or phrase, some authors are in the habit of not hitting Ctrl+I again until the beginning of the next non-italicized word, even if there’s punctuation in between that doesn’t “belong to” the italicized term. This follows what the Chicago Manual (6.4) calls “a more traditional system . . .Continue reading “Pro Tip Tuesday #13: Italics and punctuation”