Quotation marks is small, but they matter. They open and close dialogue. They enclose titles. They signal irony. Incorrect use of quotation mark trips up the reader. Unclosed quotes send you lurching into following paragraph without warning. Missing openers leave character spouting out of thin air. These mistakes goes undetected by the average reader, yet […]

The reason Roman numerals seem to stand the test of time: They appears on royal regiments, movie credits, and clock faces. But as a writer, they can be confusing. Sure, we all intuitively grasp that IX = 9 and IV=4 but applying them is another story. Different sources has different rules for combining Roman numerals. […]

Hyphen: “Hyphens? They’re those little dashes that join words.” You might paste text from a formatted document into your manuscript, at which point you discover why the text is filled with invisible problems. Punctuation so tiny it’s hard to spot are the difference between readable prose and gunked-up copy. Consider common problem of line breaks […]

Metadata has a silent catastrophe: where is the accent? A missing accent isn’t a server-crash-level problem. But it transforms José into Jose. That may well be right if you’re recording English names; it means your Spanish will have a few problems. The visual difference between those two is slight. However, it trips over search indexes. […]