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Style Guide
Sources:
- Associated Press Stylebook 2013 (AP) https://www.apstylebook.com/
- Bitcoin wiki https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Main_Page (BW)
- Cambridge Business English Dictionary http://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/business-english/derisk
- Investopedia http://www.investopedia.com/
- Merriam-Webster Unabridged http://unabridged.merriam-webster.com/ (W11)
- Techterms.com http://www.techterms.com/ (TT)
- Termwiki http://www.termwiki.com/
- Wikipedia http://www.wikipedia.org
- Brainy Quote https://www.brainyquote.com/
- Free Online Dictionary http://www.thefreedictionary.com/
Introduction
Authors, this is a guide to help you make the process of composition more efficient and clear across the board.
Editors, this is a primer to help you understand the conventions to follow when editing a work.
Style is more or less subjective, sometimes people disagree, feel free to interpret this guide liberally when the situation calls for it. It is not meant to be an intellectual burden.
Don’t think of this guide as a hand -me-down book of rules and inviolable codes and regulations. Think of it as a way to trigger your creativity, all the while reining it in just a little to make sure your ideas are coherent to the general public. What are the correct naming conventions to use? What are the definitions to basic and or certain more esoteric concepts? What is a good way to write listicles? Reviews? How to brainstorm for a topic? What kinds of topics are appropriate for the site? For a piece of syndication? These are all questions this guide will aim to help you answer.
Based on the decision editors have made in the past when encountering certain issues and or dilemmas, one can glean wisdom that may be beneficial to future posts. The hope here is to gradually evolve a set of standards which can be adapted to a myriad of situations that Writers and Editors are likely to encounter when developing copy for this site. Thereby easing the workload of authors and relieving mental strain, all the while improving site synergy. It’s like mathematical graph, all you need to create beautiful patterns, are some well – thought – out constraints.
Numbers, Dates, and Currency:
● Write out numbers one through nine; use digits up to one million: 10, 11, 12,
13, 14,… 20, 21,… 100, 101,… 1000, 1001; first, second, third,… ninth,
10th, 100th
● For numerals of a million use the word; e.g., 1 million, 1.4 million US$ 1.8
million.
● Decimals — in English, they are represented with a dot “.” not with a comma
“,”. For example: 44.56, not 44,56 (as in Europe).
● If numerals are small (one to nine), but include decimals, use digits/ciphers;
e.g.; 4.3, 5.12, etc.
● Add a comma in numerals 10,000 and above; e.g., 10,000, 23,450, 454,000
● All currency in US dollars. Convert, if necessary. Put US in front of dollar
sign: US$100
● Distinguish between US dollars and the dollars of other countries:
US$450.35, CAN$99.68
● 50 BTC, .000234 BTC, 1000 mBTC
● March 2008 (no comma)
● Years: 1980s, the ’80s
Punctuation
- Change dashes in headings to a colon (CSM)
- For em dashes, use a hyphen surrounded by a space on each side
- Quotations marks: punctuation goes inside (US style). Exceptions:
- European authors may sometimes put punctuation outside of quotation marks.
- When quotation marks are used to indicate a string of characters that a user must type exactly, or when the string contains punctuation (such as in an IP address), you may put punctuation outside of quotations. (Example: “66.175.222.204”.)
- Use double quotes, except for quotes within quotes
- Replace contractions such as “we’re” with “we are”
- Ellipses are surrounded by spaces . . . and are not needed at the beginning or end of quoted text
Abbreviations
- State abbreviations without periods (NY)
- File formats in full caps (CSV)
- Names with initials (use periods and spaces): P. D. James, M. F. K. Fisher, but Louis C.K.
General
- Title capitalization: Use headline-style and capitalize “first, last, and all important” words in the article title
- Single space between sentences
- Blog post titles and show episodes go in quotes
- “That” is restrictive (no comma needed) and “which” is nonrestrictive (comma needed)
- Quotes of more than four lines: turn into extract (block quotation) with no quotation marks
- UI elements: Use the same wording and capitalization that people will see in the onscreen element. Put labels in bold. (Examples: Click Comments. Click Share.) (YSG)
- Possessives: Hughes’s, DFS’s, physics’
- Like or as? Like is preposition followed by an object. As is a conjunction followed by a clause with a subject and verb.
Word List:
51% attack
A
altcoin
among (not amongst)
and/or — do not use slash; choose between “or,” “and,” or “or both”
Andreas Antonopoulos
B
Bitcoin Foundation, the foundation