SJC-style-and-production-guide-2012

These are examples of writers’ common failure critically to examine their writing to ensure thatit makes sense. In these examples, the modifier, the phrase that seeks to describe a person orthing, appears to be modifying something else in the sentence. Always take care to see thatmodifiers and what they are modifying are clearly associated.damp, dampen besides the literal sense of something being made wet, can mean to dull(criticism, for example). Presumably a metaphoric antonym of crisp, brittle, brilliant in soundsparticularly.dash Do not use a hyphen as a dash. Use an en-dash (–), which is longer than a hyphen andshorter than an em-dash. You can find the en-dash in MSWord in , . Theen-dash takes a space both before and after.TIP: YOU CAN SET UP MSWORD TO REPLACE THE KEYBOARD HYPHENAUTOMATICALLY WITH AN EN-DASH BY USING , AND . CHECK THE BOX. THIS ALSO APPLIES TOELLIPSIS AND QUOTATION MARKS.data are NOT ‘data is’.date ‘26 March 2012’ If you need to also write the day, use a comma, thus: ‘Monday, 26 March2012’. (Also see time.)deaf, mute or dumb. Don’t use. Use ‘a person with speech disability, or hearing disability’.This avoids type-casting an entire person for what is a partial feature of their lives.decimals better than fractions. But in principle best to translate numbers into words or roundingespecialy for broadcasting. So that 3 1/2 can be written ‘three and a half,’ if it’s a number lessthan 10. Generally numbers less than 10 are written as words, unless they’re being compared.For example, 5 people out of 7 prefer sausages at barbecues. But only five people turned upfor the barbecue. If a fraction is awkward, that is, not half, quarter or even three quarters,decimals are best. So, 13.7 times is fine. For numbers less than one, use a zero in front of thedecimal point. For example, 0.15 per cent. But for blood alcohol content, drop the zero, thus:.15. But don’t use decimals if you are just showing broad trends, when detailed precision isnot required.decorations Civilian and military decorations are used in identifying a person only if thedecoration has some special relevance to the news report or feature.defence (n) defensive, defensible (adj). Note, American spelling doesn’t use the ‘c’.definite not definate – a common mistake.deleb a dead celebrity.delusion should not be confused with illusion. The former is to get something wrong, makea wrong judgement in the face of contrasting evidence. The latter is a visual trick, used bymagicians, for example.dependant (n) dependent (adj)descendant (n) and descendent (adj).descendant and ancestor are often confused. Your descendents are your children, and theirchildren etc. Your ancestors are your dead parents, grandparents etc. So, descendant issomebody descended from ancestors.despite, not ‘in spite of’, which has negative connotations.PAGE 35 – 2012UQ SJC STYLEBOOK