Tag Archives: quotations
Inserting Em Dashes & En Dashes
Proofreaders’ Marks It’s a little-known fact that dashes come in different sizes. Most folks know about the hyphen, but fewer are familiar with the em dash and the en dash. The length of the em dash corresponds to the width … Continue reading
Spell It Out
Proofreaders’ Marks So you were taking notes in class, and, boy, that professor was professing at just about the speed of light. So it’s no wonder you took some shortcuts as your fingers flew across the keys—# instead of number, … Continue reading
Marking Capitals and Small Capitals
Proofreaders’ Marks Unless you’re e. e. cummings or k.d. lang, you’re probably fond of using capital letters from time to time.* But what if you happen to miss one of them now and again? Well, you can easily turn a … Continue reading
Inserting Question Marks
Proofreaders’ Marks Uh-oh, that question ends with a period and you need to change it. Well, this proofreaders’ mark is one of the easiest. All you need to do is draw a question mark wherever it ought to be: In … Continue reading
Marking Hyphens
Proofreaders’ Marks Hyphens are a handy sort of punctuation. You can use them to stick two words together or to break a word down to size at a line break. But, as you can imagine, a little red hyphen between … Continue reading
Marking Italics
Proofreaders’ Marks Italics come in handy: they’re great for emphasis, for foreign words, for titles of books and movies, for words as words, and more. So how do you add italics to roman text? You simply underline the words you’d … Continue reading
Changing Capitals to Lowercase
Proofreaders’ Marks Maybe caps lock was on. Or maybe the author just got a little carried away, capitalizing anything that seemed remotely important. Either way those capitals need to be lowercased. So how do you mark that on your document? … Continue reading
Deleting Stuff
Proofreaders’ Marks Unwanted letters, words, and punctuation can seem to crop up out of nowhere when I’m writing. Sometimes it’s just that I’ve realized I don’t really need that sentence or word, and sometimes it’s my errant fingers typing things … Continue reading
Transposing Letters and Words
Proofreaders’ Marks Today’s proofreaders’ mark allows you to swap two letters or words. Sometimes those typing fingers just go so fast that our letters jumble, or our cutting and pasting goes a little awry and our words end up in … Continue reading