Doctor's notes

Your consistency checks should take in whether apostrophes and quote marks are straight ('like this', and here's a straight apostrophe), or curly (‘like this’, and here’s a curly apostrophe). Many publishers will prefer curly quotes, and as a bare minimum you can specify ‘curly quotes throughout’ in your typesetter’s instructions, which would prompt a find and replace at typesetting stage.

However, it’s helpful to everyone if you can ensure this consistency yourself. You can achieve it with pasting a straight quote mark into Word’s ‘Find’ command – this would find all quote marks and apostrophes for you to quickly review for straightness or curliness. If you pasted an opening curly quote mark into ‘Find’ you would only get the opening curly ones, not straight marks, closing…

When I type ‘themself’ into Word, it automatically changes to ‘themselves’. However, as with many of the decisions Word sometimes makes for you, you shouldn’t allow it without careful thought.

‘Themself’, the reflexive pronoun for the singular ‘they’, has been in use for years, is approved by the Chicago Manual of Style 17th edition (section 5.48), and, like ‘yourself’, has the advantage of conveying the fact that an individual is being referred to.

If you want to read more about ‘themself’, Sarah Grey wrote a blog about it in 2017, and I wrote a blog about it too, in 2019.

There are a range of ways US style varies from styles generally used in the UK. Here are the main differences:

• Overall spelling style: ise/yse (organise/paralyse) or ize/yse (organize/paralyse) in UK style; ize/yze (organize/paralyze) in US style;
• Specific spellings or types of spelling: travelling, sceptic, colour, defence, mould, grey in UK spelling; traveling, skeptic, color, defense, mold, gray in US spelling;
• Dates: UK style is 1 January 2012; US style is January 1, 2012. 9/11 in US style would mean 11 September; in UK style it would mean 9 November;
• Punctuation: commas or full stops usually appear outside closing quote marks in UK style; they’re usually within closing quote…

Verb disagreement tends to happen either when people amend the subject (such as ‘colleague’ to ‘colleagues’) and not the verb (such as ‘makes’ to ‘make’) or when there’s a fairly long sentence and the writer loses sight of the subject at the beginning of it: ‘The Queen, with her ladies-in-waiting, guards and corgis, who get packed into a number of train carriages, go to Balmoral twice a year.’ Always check carefully for the agreement of the verb with the subject, particularly in long sentences.

Web addresses can look messy. You don’t need both https and www, generally, or the slash at the end of a web address. Sometimes an alternative url is available that doesn’t include a string of numbers. Check your shortened version, and if it works include it instead. Or consider using linked text in materials that can be read on a screen. This means that the url is hidden.

An ‘x’ isn’t the same as a multiplication sign, and neither is a hyphen or an en dash the same as a minus sign. If you are editing any text that contains sums or formulas, check that the correct signs are included. You should be able to find them in the symbols section of Word.