3 Tips for Producing Consistent Written Content

3 Tips for Producing Consistent Written Content 3 Tips for Producing Consistent Written Content 3 Tips for Producing Consistent Written Content By Mark Nichol There are many editorial strategies for making text easy to write, edit, and read. Here are a few guidelines for simplifying how your company, organization, or publication (even if it’s merely a personal blog) produces content. 1. Minimize House Style â€Å"House style† refers to treatment of specialized terminology and treatment of spelling, capitalization, numbers, or punctuation that differs from the norm. Before you decide to routinely spell a word in a variant or obsolete form (for example, writing archeology instead of archaeology), capitalize generic words (â€Å"The Company is dedicated to excellence†), use a numeral rather than spelling the number out (â€Å"We have 5 guiding principles†), or go against custom in formatting punctuation (for example, employing single quotation marks instead of double quotation marks), consider whether the divergence is worth the effort- and, if so, publicize and document the decision so that all content your organization produces is consistent. The more clear and thorough your house style is, the easier it is to maintain high-quality content. On the other hand, the less extensive and cumbersome your house style is, because there are fewer exceptions to attend to, the easier it is to maintain high-quality content. 2. Always Use the Serial Comma Many publications follow the Associated Press Style Book’s policy of omitting serial commas. (The serial comma is the last comma in a list such as â€Å"apples, oranges, and pears.†) Unfortunately, this modest effort to simplify by avoiding an optional punctuation mark actually complicates matters: When a list contains an element that includes a conjunction (â€Å"apples, oranges and tangerines and pears†), the sentence organization is compromised, so an exception must be made, which results in inconsistency. For the sake of uniformity and simplicity, always include a serial comma, the recommendation of The Chicago Manual of Style, the handbook of record for many book publishers and other content producers. On a related note, use semicolons for lists only when the presence of one or more commas within one or more list elements creates ambiguity, especially when one or more elements of the list is itself a list (â€Å"apples, oranges, and pears; milk and cheese; and bread†). The length of the list, and the presence of conjunctions within list elements, are not factors. 3. Capitalize Only When Necessary Capitalize proper names only, and capitalize job titles only before names. Generic abbreviations of entity names (â€Å"the company,† â€Å"the board,† â€Å"the department†) and references to concepts (â€Å"human resources†) are not proper names (though â€Å"Human Resources† is correct as the name of a specific department). Capitalization rules about art movements, medical and scientific terminology, geological and historical eras, and other scientific or cultural phenomena can seem (and sometimes are) arbitrary, so double-check reliable editorial resources. Want to improve your English in five minutes a day? Get a subscription and start receiving our writing tips and exercises daily! Keep learning! Browse the Writing Basics category, check our popular posts, or choose a related post below:100 Idioms About Numbers16 Misquoted Quotations10 Functions of the Comma