a lot
Two words
grammar
a or an before H?
Use an before a silent H: an heir, an hour, an honest politician, an honorary consul; use a before an aspirated H: a hero, a hotel, a historian (but don't change a direct quote if the speaker says, for example, "an historic"). With abbreviations, be guided by pronunciation: an LSE student, a CERN student
absolute zero
Not "the absolute zero".
-273.15 °C or 0 K.
The apparatus was cooled to near absolute zero to ensure that the electronics were in a superconducting state
adverbs
No hyphen is normally needed between an adverb and the adjective it modifies:
a hotly contested result
a constantly evolving theory
To avoid ambiguity, a hyphen is needed after adverbs such as “ill” and “well” that have the same spelling as the corresponding adjective, as in
a well-dressed man
an ill-considered reply
No hyphen is needed if the adverbial phrase comes after the noun, as in
the man was well dressed
beam line
Two words, except in the title of CERN's competition for high-school students, Beamline for Schools (BL4S) – capital "B" and capital "S".
brackets ( ) [ ]
Follow OD's advice on brackets, copied here below:
There are two main types of brackets.
Round brackets
Round brackets (also called parentheses) are mainly used to separate off information that isn’t essential to the meaning of the rest of the sentence. If you removed the bracketed material the sentence would still make perfectly good sense. For example:
Mount Everest (8848 metres) is the highest mountain in the world.
chemical compounds
Chemical compounds and alloys should be hyphenated, but the elements should not be capitalised:
The current in the dipole magnets is carried by cables made of niobium-titanium (NbTi).
collective nouns
Do they take a singular or plural verb? It depends on the sense, but use singular where possible.
contractions
Contractions such as “there’s” “they’re”, “didn’t”, “he’ll” and “she’d” do not automatically make a story more accessible. Contractions can appear annoyingly chatty, and can be imprecise too (“it’s” can stand for “it is” or “it has”) and so detract from clarity. If anything, contractions make a story harder to understand, especially if there are several of them in the same sentence.
double-check
use hyphen
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