LEC052025. Julia Mathew. "Mechanics of Writing"
Mechanics of Writing
“What comes first,
the pause or the comma?” – This is the opening line of Dana J. Young’s The Mechanics of Writing. According to
her, a shocking number of writers answer this question wrongly. Young uses the
word ‘pause’ in a deeper sense than expected. Beyond the idea of the ‘space’ before
a comma, she also means the writers’ approach to making writing decisions, as
writers often take decisions based on guesses rather than firm knowledge: this
is where the mechanics of writing comes in. Mechanics of writing refers to the
established convention of the essential components of (scholarly) writing. This
includes punctuation, spellings, capitalisation, abbreviation, etc. Given below
are some of the major mechanics of writing:
1. 1. Apostrophe(s) indicate contractions (rarely acceptable in scholarly writing) and possessives:
e.g., the group’s privileges
General practice is to form the possessive of
monosyllabic proper names ending in a sibilant sound (s, z, sh, zh, ch, j) by
adding an apostrophe and another s (Keats’s poems, Marx’s
theories).
Names in classical literature are an exception, by
convention:
e.g., Mars’ wrath
2. 2. Colon(s) are commonly used to introduce quotations.
Always skip one space after a colon.
3. Comma(s) are usually required between items in a series (blood, sweat, and tears), between coordinate adjectives (an absorbing, frightening account), before coordinating conjunctions joining independent clauses, around parenthetical elements, and after fairly long phrases or clauses preceding the main clause of a sentence.
4. 4. [Em] dash.
An [em] dash is typed … with no space before or after. The [em] dash, often overused, has only a few legitimate uses:
Around parenthetical elements that require a number of internal commas:
e.g., “Many twentieth-century American writers—Faulkner, Capote, Styron, Williams etc., come from the South."
Before summarizing appositive:
e.g., “Stray dogs, abandoned cats, injured birds, orphaned baby rabbits—all found a home with us.”
(En) dashes are used to indicate range (six – nine) or indicate negative numbers (– 40 degree Celsius).
6. 6. Exclamation marks should be used sparingly in scholarly
writing.
7. 7. Hyphen(s) are used to form some types of compound words, particularly compound adjectives that precede the word(s) they modify (a mind-boggling experience, a well-established policy.
Hyphens also join prefixes to capitalized words (post-Renaissance) and link pairs of coequal nouns (poet-priest, teacher-scholar). Many other compounds, however, are written as one word (wordplay, storytelling) or as two (social security tax, a happily married man).
8. 8. Italics
It is used to indicate words and letters referred to as
words and letters.
e.g., Shaw spelled Shakespeare
without the final ‘e’.
Foreign words in an English text:
e.g., The renaissance courtier was expected to display sprezzatura in the face of adversity.
The numerous exceptions to this last rule include
quotations entirely in another language, titles of articles in another language
(placed within quotation marks), proper names, and foreign words anglicized
through frequent usage.
Avoid frequent use of italics for emphasis.
9. Parentheses ( ) are used to enclose parenthetical remarks and to enclose some items in documentation as extra information.
10 10. Period(s) end sentences. They also come at the end of notes and after complete blocks of information in bibliographical citations.
The period follows a parenthesis that falls at the end of a sentence. It is placed within the parenthesis when the parenthetical element is independent (see, not this sentence, but the next).
11 11.Quotation marks indicate that material was taken verbatim from another source.
Double quotation marks are used for words to which attention is being directed (e.g., words purposely misused or used in a special sense).
12 12. Semicolons are used to separate items in a series when
some of the items require internal commas.
13 13. Slashes (virgules) are used to separate lines of poetry and
elements of dates, to enclose phonemic transcription; and occasionally to
separate alternative words (and/or).
14 14. Square brackets [] are used for an unavoidable parenthesis
within a parenthesis, to enclose interpolations in a quotation.
15 15. Ellipsis – If material from an original quotation has been omitted, and the quotation appears to be a grammatical sentence or a series of grammatical sentences, the omission (or omissions) should be indicated by using [an] ellipsis.
e.g., As Robert Pring-Mill notes of Neruda’s years in the East, “The sense of isolation … grew into an obsessive loneliness, under the pressure of two alien cultures.”
16 16. Capitalisation.
In all English titles, not only of entire works (such as novels, lectures, or essays) but also of divisions of works (such as parts or chapters), capitalize the first letter of the first word, the last word, and all the principal words—including nouns and adjectives in hyphenated compounds, excluding articles, prepositions (except when they function as adverbs), conjunctions, and the “to” in infinitives.
e.g., The Teaching of Spanish in English-Speaking Countries
17. Abbreviation is a shortened form of a word or phrase. It may
consist of a group of letters, or words taken from the full version of the word
or phrase:
e.g.,
the word abbreviation can itself be represented by the
abbreviation abbr., abbrv., or abbrev.; NBM, for nil (or nothing) by mouth is an abbreviated medical instruction.
It
may also consist of initials only, a mixture of initials and words, or words or
letters representing words in another language (i.e. or RSVP).
Some
types of abbreviations are acronyms (which are pronounceable), initialisms (using initials only), or grammatical contractions.
Young, Dana J. Mechanics of Writing. Writer's Toolkit Publishing. Web.
www.wikipedia.org
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