Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Exclamations
Avoid exclamation marks! Never use more than one!!
The proper place for an exclamationmark is after an exclamation (such as “Oh!”—
not a common expression in technical writing), or, rarely, after a genuine surprise.
Performance deteriorated after addition of resources!
This is acceptable but not particularly desirable. It would be better to omit the
exclamation and add emphasis some other way.
Remarkably, performance deteriorated after addition of resources.
Hyphenation
Many compoundwords, such as “website”, would originally have beenwritten as two
separate words, “web site”. When the combination becomes common, it is hyphen-
ated, “web-site”, then eventually the hyphen is dropped to give the final form. Some
words are in a state of transition from one form to another. In the database literature,
for example, all three of “data base”, “data-base”, and “database” are used, and in
general writing both “co-ordinate” and “coordinate” are common. Make sure that
you are consistent.
Hyphens are also used to override right associativity. By default we parse phrases
such as “randomized data structure” into
randomized data-structure
, and thus realize
that the topic is not a structure for randomized data. In some phrases that are not
right-associative, such as “skew-data hashing”, we need the hyphen to disambiguate
(although in this case it might be better towrite “hashing for skewdata”).
2
Sometimes
there is no correct hyphenation and the sentence has to be rewritten. The phrase “array
based data structure” should be written “array-based data structure”, but “binary tree
based data structure” should probably be written, albeit awkwardly, as “data structure
based on binary trees”.
Good word-processors hyphenate words when they run over the end of a line, to
preserve right-justification. Automatic hyphenation is not always correct and should
be checked, to ensure that none of the syllables are broken or that the break is not too
close to the word's end. For example, the hyphenations “mac-hine” and “availab-le”
should be changed (to “mach-ine” and “avail-able”), and “edited” should probably
not be hyphenated at all.
Note that there are three different “dash” symbols: the hyphen “-” used for joining
words, the minus sign or en-dash “-” used in arithmetic and for ranges such as “pages
101-127”, and the em-dash “—” used for punctuation.
2
There is a hyphen missing in the headline “Squad helps dog bite victim”.
