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Style Manual - Any burning questions?

Today is a good day for the editor in me. It is the day my style manual has arrived.

As I am hoping to start freelance editing and working in a publishing environment soon, this book will become my bible. Should you use a comma there? Let me go grab my style manual and settle this. Google will thank me for the load I am about to take off it.

I have chosen the New Oxford Style Manual published in 2012. Nice and up to date as well as originating from my home county.

Here’s the big question – do you have a question?




It can be anything related to writing. If it’s to do with grammar, punctuation, formatting a book (self-publishing), or about the publishing process then I’ll get to use my new manual (as well as search the depths of the internet)! If it’s something more subjective then it might be a future writing tip, so still ask away.

You can post here. You can contact me on figment, wattpad,or authonomy. This will be open for as long as I blog. I want to write useful articles which will give you tools to polish up your novel. So let me know which tools you don’t have and I’ll see if I can help with that.

Cheers!
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Comments

  1. Unknown24 January 2014 at 08:03

    What are your opinions on said versus other dialogue verbs? I've heard from a few places that said should be used in the majority, or even totally, because it's a word that becomes invisible to the reader. Is there any evidence on that (I'm kind of interested in the psychology of language)?

    I can see the need to use dialogue verbs and modifiers sensibly (no silly ones like vocalize, and no whisper softly or scream loudly), but that really goes for anything. It just seems odd to want to cut out a chunk of words from a book's vocabulary outright.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Scookie25 January 2014 at 19:41

    Interesting question. I definitely have an opinion but I'll do some more research into this to give you the best answer I can.

    Cheers for the question!

    ReplyDelete

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