style

abbreviations and acronyms

coluanai — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 15:06:10 +0000

Do not use full stops in abbreviations, or spaces between initials, including those in proper names:

US, M&S, WE Weber, WH Smith, etc.

Use all capitals if an abbreviation is pronounced as the individual letters: BBC, VAT, etc; if it is an acronym (i.e. pronounced as a word) spell out with all capitals (NASA, NATO, etc.) unless it can be considered to have entered the language as an everyday word, such as awol, laser and, more recently, asbo and sim card.

contractions

coluanai — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 16:22:31 +0000

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.

Higgs field

coluanai — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 17:13:20 +0000

not "Higgs' field" or, worse, "Higg's field"

kaon

coluanai — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 11:02:00 +0000

Not "K-meson"

Nobel prize

coluanai — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 14:15:04 +0000

Capitals for specific titles: Nobel Prize in Physics, Nobel Prize in Literature, Nobel Peace Prize, etc.

But: "She won a Nobel prize".

Nobel laureate

See nobelprize.org for detailed information about Nobel laureates, including biographies and full transcriptions of their acceptance speeches.

fire brigade

coluanai — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 14:39:05 +0000

Lower case. The informal name for CERN's Fire and Rescue Service

however

coluanai — Mon, 12 Mar 2012 15:46:21 +0000

Don't use it in a web context. Say "but".

See Words to avoid in web texts.

CDS

coluanai — Fri, 15 Jun 2012 14:05:49 +0000

The CERN Document Server.

See video.

dark matter

coluanai — Tue, 14 Aug 2012 09:35:28 +0000

lower case

Brout-Englert-Higgs (BEH) mechanism

coluanai — Thu, 13 Dec 2012 11:50:26 +0000

Not "Higgs mechanism" or "Higgs-Brout-Englert" mechanism.

See Higgs boson

inter

coluanai — Wed, 02 Oct 2013 08:27:37 +0000

The prefix "inter" does not take a hyphen.

interdepartmental

intergovernmental

interrelated

BUT inter-agency

balance sheet (noun), balance-sheet (adj.)

Anonymous — Fri, 08 Sep 2017 09:36:34 +0000

anti-ion

roarscot — Fri, 09 Aug 2019 14:03:15 +0000

capital letters

coluanai — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 15:18:06 +0000

Use minimal capitalisation. A heading starts with a capital, but other words should not be capped up, unless they are proper nouns. If in doubt, choose lower case.

Exceptions include: our Sun, Earth (the planet), and our Solar System, Universe and Moon, but not other suns, solar systems, universes and moons, or earth as in soil.

Use a capital letter when you are writing the names of people, languages, places and words relating to them:

galaxy

coluanai — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 16:23:49 +0000

Always lower case.