punctuation

exclamation marks

coluanai — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 11:05:37 +0000

Avoid using them. If the statement is surprising or exciting, it will be clear to the reader without the need for an exclamation mark.

In particular, avoid multiple exclamation marks, e.g.:

…this year the Wildcats are here and full of determination, as never before!!!!

brackets ( ) [ ]

coluanai — Fri, 02 Dec 2011 08:55:47 +0000

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.

quotes

coluanai — Fri, 02 Dec 2011 14:59:31 +0000

Readers are entitled to believe that anything appearing within direct quotes are the actual words used by the speaker.

Remove ums and aahs and correct for grammar
If you are unsure of the exact wording use reported speech
Open quotes with a colon, and close them after the punctuation mark
Use says, not said (though said is permissible for famous historical examples)

"I really enjoyed the part about the accelerators," says Joe Bloggs. "It got me interested in physics again."

French

coluanai — Thu, 12 Apr 2012 13:52:58 +0000

For guidelines on writing in French – for CERN websites and print documents alike – refer to the translation department's "Guide de Typographie".

ampersand (&)

coluanai — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 17:10:02 +0000

Don't use them, even in headlines.

Exceptions:

specific abbrevations, such as R&D
the CERN & Society Foundation
certain company names – Smith & Jones Consulting
when artistic considerations dictate – on a logo, for example
academic references – (Grant & Smith, 1998)

QGP

Anonymous — Fri, 08 Sep 2017 09:36:48 +0000

Quark–gluon plasma

Lower case, note the en dash

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:

hyphens

coluanai — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 15:27:09 +0000

Too many hyphens make text look cluttered, so avoid them where you can, but they are often necessary to avoid ambiguity. See ndash.

Compound adjectives

Use a hyphen to join the parts of compound adjectives, for example:

Green-belt land, zero-gravity environment, state-of-the-art phones, well-behaved patients, ill-considered attack, better-trained staff, a little-known city.

quotation marks

coluanai — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 17:06:06 +0000

Use double quotes in text, captions, etc. Single quotes for headlines, and quotes within quotes. See quotes.

Do not use quotation marks to soften headlines.

Higgs boson "found" does not mean anything. The quote marks render the headline ambiguous and confuse the reader. Has it been found or not?

CERN physicists spot tantalising hints of Higgs boson is more elegant and gives more information, without the need for quotes.

ellipsis

coluanai — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 17:12:36 +0000

Use the ellipsis character (… ) in quoted material if you need to show that words have been omitted from the middle of the original quote. In HTML5, it is written: …

The ellipsis should always be followed by a space.