Writing Style

Writing Style

This guide is based on the style book which is given to all journalists at The Economist.

JohnsonMay 10th 2004
From Economist.com
FROM 1992 until 1999 The Economist published a monthly column on the English language, under the by-line 'Johnson', as in Samuel Johnson, the famous man of letters and dictionary-maker. The columns, and a few later, longer articles, (listed below) were all written by Stephen Hugh-Jones. He writes now:

“My aim was to entertain readers, not learnedly instruct them; quite shamelessly, I'm an enthusiast of language, not linguistics, a curio-collector, not a professor. We were once taken to task by an academic: why did we not cover language as seriously as other topics? I answered him that one can describe a car as riding smoothly, without dilating on the geometry of its hyperdihedral MacPherson struts. I suspect the real answer was simpler: we could have offered the coverage he wanted, but it for sure wouldn't have been me that wrote it. And, yes, to be wholly serious for once, that 'me' is indeed English, whether pedants like it or not.”
 

Introduction Metaphors Short words Unnecessary words Active, not passive Jargon Tone Journalese and slang Americanisms Syntax Some dos and don'ts Some common solecisms Abbreviations Accents Capitals People Organisations, acts, etc Places Political terms Historical periods Trade names Euro-terms e-expressions Miscellaneous (Upper case) Miscellaneous (Lower case) Figures Hyphens Have you got it? Take a quiz based on The Economist's Style Guide... more

The write stuff

Italics

Plurals

Punctuation

Apostrophes

Brackets

Colons

Commas

Dashes

Full stops

Inverted commas

Question-marks

Semi-colons

Singular or plural?

Spelling

Common problems

Miscellaneous

People

Places

Titles

THE STYLE BOOK WAS WRITTEN BY JOHN GRIMOND.

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