Article formatting guidelines

April 12th, 2007

Use of symbols
Please, please, please do not use any special formatting or symbol characters — or search and replace them before submitting your work.

What to look for: We specifically do not want “curly” quotation marks and apostrophes (automatically inserted by some word processing programs, although you can disable this replacement feature), fraction symbols (instead use 1/2, 1/4, etc.) ampersands (& to and), ellipses and both en and em dashes. (Please use — for a dash.)

Why? HTML is somewhat limited and displays differently on various systems and browsers, so we like to use only standard ASCII characters that don’t display only as blanks or little black-bordered boxes.

Other formatting issues
Doublespacing: Only one space is needed before a new sentence. Please avoid doublespacing after periods.

Paragraph breaks: Please do not indent any text in your submitted work, and separate paragraphs with a single blank line.

Bullet points: Please use * to signify bulleting.

Emphasis: If italics or bold are needed for emphasis, please use asterisks: “She said that *usually* pregnant women…” We will properly code it before publication.

Lists and commas: We do not use serial commas.

Usage: Some of our punctuation is somewhat European in style. We do not use the period after Dr, Mrs, Mr, etc., or in names (Michael J Fox, Christine S Thompson), or in other abbreviations, preferring MD, CNM, RN, LC, ACOG, etc. Please spell out numbers under 10, except for weights and measures. Please spell out most abbreviations, including pounds, ounces, centimeters. Please spell out all states — we don’t use postal abbreviations (CA, NY, FL) nor do we want AP-style state abbreviations (Calif., Mass.).

One last note: We prefer the word “websites” to the early-Internet “Web sites.” (Even Google agrees with us, suggesting “website” as the corrected spelling of “web site.”)

Entry Filed under: For writers