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. […]

Most writers don’t think of capitalization as a design decision, but rather do it by reflex. School trained them to put an uppercase letter at the beginning of each sentence and each proper noun. This is a good grammar rule, but it may not be best for readability or brand. Case distribution changes things when […]

If you’re looking at a manuscript and thinking ‘Gah!’ at all of the numbers, then you might be experiencing the quiet panic that accompanies too many numbers on a page. Whether it’s a technical manual which resembles a spreadsheet, or a historical novel where there’s a date included in each paragraph, our brains don’t read […]

Even one careless mark can transform a pro’s work into what looks like high-school draft. Yes, it’s a small mistake, but it makes you look more like an amateur than anything else. And yet writers spends hours agonizing about character arcs or pacing, without noticing how those little punctuation marks keeps their syntax glued in […]