Proofreaders’ Marks It’s a little-known fact that dashes come in different sizes. Most folks know about the hyphen, but fewer are familiar with the em dash and the en dash. The length of the em dash corresponds to the width of the letter m: —. The en dash is the width of the letter n: […]

Sometimes you just need a hyphen. You really do. Here’s proof: He was a big-city worker, a cold-case officer with slicked-back hair. is very different from He was a big city worker, a cold case officer with slicked back hair. In the first case we have an urbanite with a sleek coiffure who works on cold […]

Proofreaders’ Marks Uh-oh, that question ends with a period and you need to change it. Well, this proofreaders’ mark is one of the easiest. All you need to do is draw a question mark wherever it ought to be: In the example below the inserted question mark is clearly visible, but you can imagine how […]

Proofreaders’ Marks Hyphens are a handy sort of punctuation. You can use them to stick two words together or to break a word down to size at a line break. But, as you can imagine, a little red hyphen between two letters could be easily missed. That’s why we use the proofreaders’ mark for a […]

Proofreaders’ Marks The latest in this series explaining proofreaders’ marks concerns that workhorse punctuation mark, the comma. As we all know commas go some places and not others, but—thank goodness—that’s an entry for another day. Today’s entry is merely concerned with inserting a comma once you’ve decided you need one. We’re going to use that […]

Proofreaders’ Marks Periods are the smallest dab of ink on the page, but they’re some of the most important marks. Without periods paragraphs become very difficult to read, discouraging readers who have to sleuth around for the beginnings and ends of sentences. And abbreviations—a.m.—start to look like words—am. Being such tiny things, periods do occasionally […]

To italicize (punctuation) or not to italicize, that is the question. The Rule (According to CMS 6.3): Punctuation should appear in the same font or typeface as the general body text of a document. So if you have a roman sentence that contains an italicized word followed by a comma, the comma should appear in […]