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Thursday, February 4, 2016

Marking Text - Some Guidelines for Authors

This month I decided to share a link (below) that I found very helpful as far as guidelines for marking text in your story. Particularly, when do you italicize, underline, or use quotation marks, etc.? I always receive style sheets guideline notes from copy editors (who use the Chicago Manual of Style) as far as formatting my works, but when you self-pub, it's really helpful to know, especially how song titles, book titles, TV titles, etc., are to be shown so that they stand out uniformly - some are italicized and with some you can use quotation marks. The link includes a lot of other good consistency tips as well.

Ex: With songs: I italicize the name of the album, but for the name of the song I use quotation marks.

I hope this helps those who needed to know. And I do not take credit for this link, as it is a great post on The Editor's Blog, which I find very helpful. This one was written by fiction editor, Beth Hill.

If you have any tips that work for you, please feel free to let us know.

Write on!



3 comments:

  1. I keep a kind of writing cyclopedia with this kind of information in it so when I do have a question I can usually find it pretty quickly.

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  2. Hello Charles, I can imagine that does help, having it handy. Thanks for your comment! MM

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