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MLA Style Guide

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What is the MLA Style Guide?

MLA Style GuideMLA stands for the Modern Language Association (of America). Its style manual has the full title MLA Style Manual and Guide to Scholarly Publishing. This presents a full set of protocols for the writing and presentation of documents and research in the humanities (literature, languages, media studies, and cultural studies). The guide and its standards are in general use throughout north America and Europe.

The guide does not cover the protocols used in disciplines such as history, sociology, philosophy, or sciences. These use either the Chicago Manual of Style or the Harvard System of referencing.

In the notes which follow, the terms citation (US usage) and referencing (UK usage) are used interchangeably.

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What does the MLA Style Guide do?

The MLA Style Guide offers a complete set of standards showing you how to present academic writing and research. These standards are not questions of correct or incorrect writing: they are merely a coherent system which ensure consistency and rigour in the presentation of academic writing. The standards show you how to –

  • embed quotations
  • cite secondary sources
  • give bibliographic references
  • present names and titles
  • avoid plagiarism
  • cite electronic sources
How does the MLA Style Guide work?

The MLA citation style uses a simple two-part system for citing sources. When you refer to or quote from a secondary source within your work, you provide a citation which points to an alphabetical list of Works Cited that appears at the end of the essay or term paper. The citation is an abbreviation given in brackets (Smith 128) and the full details of this source are listed at the end of your work. This example refers to page 128 in work written by someone called Smith.

This system of referencing identifies and credits the sources you have used in the essay. It allows someone reading the essay to identify and if necessary consult these secondary sources.

References within your text

In MLA style, you place references to secondary sources in the essay to briefly identify them and enable readers to find them in the list of Works Cited. These references should be kept as brief and as clear as possible.

Give only the minimum information needed to identify a source. The author’s last name and a page reference are usually sufficient. Example – (Barber 45).

Place the reference as close as possible to its source, preferably where a pause would naturally occur, which is often at the end of a sentence.

Information in the brackets should not repeat information given in the text. If you include an author’s name in a sentence, you don’t need to repeat it in your reference.

The reference should precede the punctuation mark that concludes the sentence, clause, or phrase that contains the cited material.

Electronic and online sources are cited just like print resources in references. If an online source lacks page numbers, omit numbers from the bracketed references.

Examples

Author’s name in text Browning has expressed this concern (122-25).
Author’s name in reference This concern has been expressed (Browning 122-25).
Multiple authors This hypothesis has proved very persuasive (Bradley, Morgan, and Smith 46).
Two works cited (Beetham 68; Covington 34)
Volumes and pages Robinson 3: 14-19
Corporate authors (United Nations, Economic Report 51-56)
Online sources Fetting, pars. 5-8)
List of Works Cited

References cited in the text of an essay or a research paper must appear at the end of your work in a list of Works Cited. This is also known as a bibliography. This list provides the information necessary to identify and retrieve each source that has been used in your work.

Arrange the entries in alphabetical order of the authors’ last names (surnames), or by the title for any sources without authors.

Capitalize the first word and all other principal words of the titles and subtitles of cited works listed. Do not capitalize articles, prepositions, coordinating conjunctions, or the “to” in infinitives. (The Angel at the Grave)

The titles of books and journals should be shown in italics. Choose a font in which the italic style contrasts clearly with the regular style.

Shorten the publisher’s name. For example, omit articles, business abbreviations (Co., Inc.), and descriptive words (Press, Publisher).

When multiple publishers are listed, include all of them, placing a semicolon between each.

When more than one city is listed for the same publisher, use only the first city.

Use the conjunction ‘and’, not an ampersand [&], when listing multiple authors of a single work.

Do not use the abbreviations p. or pp. to designate page numbers.

Indentation: Align the first line of the entry flush with the left margin, and indent all subsequent lines (5 to 7 spaces) to form a ‘hanging indent’.

Bibliographic description

References to an entire book should include the following elements:

  • author(s) or editor(s)
  • complete title
  • edition, if indicated
  • place of publication
  • shortened name of publisher
  • date of publication
  • medium of publication

The basic format

Lastname, Firstname. Title of Book. Place of Publication: Publisher, Year of Publication. Medium of Publication.

One author

Nabokov, Vladimir. Strong Opinions. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1973. Print.

Another work, same author

—. Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited. New York: Knopf, 1999. Print.

Two authors

Cresswell, Susan, and Charles Hoffman. Theaters of Experiment. London: Thames and Hudson, 2004. Print.

Three authors

Loewen, Thomas, Bentham Ginsberg, and Stuart Jacks. Analyzing Democratic Government. 3rd ed. New York: Norton, 1994. Print.

More than three authors

Sander, Jefferton et al. Beyond the Utility Principle. London: Heinemann, 1993. Print.

Editor (anthology or collection of essays)

Hillman, Charles, and Margery Hamilton, eds. Defining Milton’s Poetics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Print.

No author or editor

The Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook. 2014 ed. London: A and C Black. 2014. Print

Articles in books

Jones, Josephine Teresa. “Within These Walls.” Feminism and its Relation to Architecture. Ed. Maureen Harrington. New York: Lexington Books, 2010. 109-24. Print.

Reprinted article

Huntford, Thomas. “The Misreading of Ken Kesey.” Review of Contemporary Fiction 4.3 (1985): 30-43. Rpt. in Contemporary Literary Criticism. Ed. Carleen Rilmont. Vol. 61. Detroit: Gale, 1990. 308-10. Print.

Articles or entries from reference books

If the article or entry is signed, put the author’s name first; if it is unsigned, give the title first. For well-known reference works, it is not necessary to include full publication information. Include only the title of the reference source, edition, and date of publication.

Dictionary entry

“Hostages.” Def. 1a. Shorter Oxford Dictionary. 1993. Print.

Encyclopedia entry

Merrington, Barbara. “Cooking with Gas.” The Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America. Ed. Andrew F. Smith. Vol. 2. 2004. Print.

Articles in journals, magazines, and newspapers

References to periodical articles must include the following elements:

  • author(s)
  • article title
  • publication title
  • volume number
  • publication date
  • inclusive page numbers
  • medium of publication

Issue numbers should be stated as decimals to a given volume number. For instance, the number 25.4 refers to Volume 25, issue 4. When citing newspapers, it is important to specify the edition used (early ed. or late ed.) because different editions of a newspaper might contain different material.

Journal article, one author

Mentone-Cassidy, David. “Beyond Boundaries: Reaching Multi-Cultural Development.” Journal of Tourism Research 37.4 (2010): 141-63. Print.

Journal article, two authors

Langton, Jennifer, and Warren Furst. “Exploring Challenges and Opportunities Associated with Sharing Medical Resources.” International Journal of Hospital Management 29.2 (2010): 261-7. Print.

Magazine article

Keinster, Donald A. “Corporate Greed: The New Economics.” Vanity Fair 23 Nov. 2012: 84-91. Print.

Newspaper article, no author

“American Independence Day: The View from England.” The Guardian 31 May 2012, 16. Print.

Film, video, or audio recordings

Film

Manhattan. Dir. Woody Allen. 1979. Videocassette. MGM/UA Home Video, 1991.

Sound recording

Bob Dylan. Highway 61 Revisited. Columbia / Sony, 2004. CD.

Specific song

Bob Dylan. “Desolation Row.” Highway 61 Revisited. Columbia / Sony, 2004. CD.

CD-ROM

Citations should include the medium of the electronic publication (CD-ROM), the name of the vendor that made the material available on CD-ROM, and publications dates for the version used, if relevant.

“Matrimony.” Encyclopaedia Britannica. CD-ROM. London: Encyclopaedia Britannica Inc. Multimedia, 2014.

Citing online sources

References to online sources, like those for printed sources, should provide the information that both identifies a source and allows it to be located and retrieved again.

All references should include the medium of publication (Web) and the date the content was viewed.

If the source is difficult to locate, you should list the complete Web address (URL) within angle brackets after the date. In many cases, it is also necessary to identify the Web site or the database that has made the material available on line.

There are currently no fixed standards governing the organization and presentation of online publications. Consequently, the information that is available can vary widely from one resource to another. In general, references to online works require more information than references to print sources.

For instance, the online encyclopaedia Wikipedia is being edited and updated all the time – so in some instances it might be necessary to record not only the date of an entry being visited, but even the time of day.

See sections 5.6.1-4 in the MLA Handbook for more complete information on creating references to online sources.

Web page

This example includes the optional URL. All other examples below use the shorter citation format.

Cornell University Library. ‘Introduction to Research’. Cornell University Library. Cornell University, 2009. Web. 19 June 2009 <http://www.library.cornell.edu/resrch/intro>.

Personal web site

If a work is untitled, you may use a genre label such as Home page, Introduction, etc.

Remington, Gregory. Home page. Web. 16 Nov. 2008.

Entry in an online encyclopedia

‘Epstein, Jacob’. Encyclopaedia Britannica Online. Encyclopedia Britannica, 1999. Web. 27 Apr. 2009.

Article from a less familiar online reference book

Norton, John S. ‘European History and Islam’. Encyclopedia the Muslim World. Ed. Richard C. Martin. New York: Macmillan Reference-Thomson/Gale, 2004. Web. 4 July 2009.

Article in an online periodical

If pagination is unavailable or is not continuous, use n. pag. in place of the page numbers.

Chatterton, Heather. ‘The Epidemic in Saratoga’. Salon 19 Feb. 1999: n. pag. Web. 12 July 1999.

Article in a full-text journal accessed from a database

Valentino, Jose Antonio. ‘The Other Side of Facebook’. New Yorker 86.28 (2010): 54-63. Academic Search Premier. Web. 25 Jan. 2011.

Online book with print information

Henderson, Robert. South of Boston. 2nd ed. New York: Henry Holt, 1915. Google Books. Web. 30 June 2009.

The examples of MLA style and format listed on this page include many of the most common types of sources used in academic research. For additional examples and more detailed information about MLA citation style, refer to the following resources:

MLA Style Manual and Guide to Scholarly Publishing. 3rd ed. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2008. Print. [Amazon US]

MLA Style Manual and Guide to Scholarly Publishing. 3rd ed. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2008. Print. [Amazon UK]

MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers. 7th ed. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2009. Print. [Amazon US]

MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers. 7th ed. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2009. Print. [Amazon UK]

The Chicago Manual of Style: The Essential Guide for Writers, Editors and Publishers. 16th ed. Chicago: University of Chicago, 2010. Print. [Amazon US]

The Chicago Manual of Style: The Essential Guide for Writers, Editors and Publishers. 16th ed. Chicago: University of Chicago, 2010. Print. [Amazon UK]

© Roy Johnson 2014

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Moralizing in essays

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sample from HTML program and PDF book

1. Moralizing should be avoided in academic essays and term papers. You should resist turning an essay into a vehicle for sermonizing or tub-thumping. Pious sentiments concerning ‘declining standards’ and ‘sexual promiscuity’ should be avoided – especially when they are delivered (as they often are) from a self-elected position of moral righteousness.

2. Moralizing often goes along with generalising and takes two common forms. The first case occurs when the writer makes sanctimonious judgements with a lofty tone of assumed superiority: ‘It is because we despise such immoral actions in others that … ‘. You should not assume too readily that ‘we’ will all agree with you, or even that readers will share your opinion.

3. The second form of moralising often arises from failing to acknowledge that ‘morals’ are relative. What is acceptable in one society may not be in another. Try to avoid sweeping statements on morality by keeping in mind that your own system of beliefs may seem strange or irrational to someone else. This will also help you to be specific and to present your argument concretely, rather than hiding behind empty generalizations and emotional rhetoric.

4. Note by the way that the term ‘moral’ is either an adjective as in ‘a moral victory’, or a noun as in ‘the moral of the story’. Statements such as ‘It was a moral thing to do’ and ‘She is a very moral sort of person’ do not actually make much sense.

5. The purpose of almost all academic essays is to present you with an exercise in precise thinking and objective argument. You are being asked to show fine discrimination based on concrete evidence.

© Roy Johnson 2003

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Names in essays

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1. Names are always given capital letters when they are:

proper nouns James Smith
particular places Europe, East Anglia
days of the week Wednesday, Friday
months of the year June, November
public festivals Easter, Christmas
organisations British Broadcasting Corporation
institutions House of Commons
titles Archbishop of Canterbury

2. Capital letters are not necessary when a noun is being used in its general rather than its particular sense:

Manchester University / a university education

the King of France / kings and queens of Spain

3. Names which are formed from adjectival use of nouns do not take capital letters:

french doors     indian ink     roman numerals

4. The plurals of most names are formed by the addition of s

the Andersons     the Joyces     the Frys

5. Where the name ends in s, ch, or sh the plural is
formed by adding es:

the Rosses     the Marshes     the Finches

6. The following example, taken from The Guardian of 15 October 1991, combines the names of the Prime Minister, two political parties, an institution, and an organisation:

The Tories yesterday raised the stakes in the continuing battle over the credibility of John Major’s National Health Service assurances when they accused Labour of twisting statistics and the English language to sustain its claim that Mr Major is engineering a “creeping privatisation” of the service.

7. Capital letters are also used for the names of:

public thoroughfares Bois de Boulogne
civic holidays Christmas Day
geographical names Straight of Gibraltar
important events World War II
trade names Xerox, Jaguar, Kleenex

8. Where an English form of a foreign place-name exists, it should be used:

Dunkirk   Moscow   Munich   Naples   Venice

© Roy Johnson 2003

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Narratives in essays

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1. Narratives are accounts that describe a sequence of events. When answering questions which concern events in a sequence, you should avoid drifting into merely retelling the ‘story of what happens’. This is called narrative paraphrase. This feature often occurs in fiction, poetry, drama, history, film, politics, or anything else which involves events which take place over a span of time.

2. The temptation to retell the story will always be strong, for two reasons:

  • it is always a lot easier than answering the question
  • it gives you the feeling that you are answering the question – when you are not

3. Remember that almost all essay questions require that you construct an argument which should be illustrated by evidence and examples drawn from your study materials. It is not enough merely to retell a story.

4. Select that one incident, character, event, or phrase which illustrates the point of your argument, then stop! You should resist the temptation to discuss ‘what happens next’.

5. If you discover on re-reading your essay that it is full of phrases such as ‘and then he…and then she … following this they … and then next they’ – something is likely to be wrong. Pick out the one point which provides the evidence you require, and eliminate the rest.

6. Obviously, if a question asks you to discuss a succession of events, you would normally deal with them in the sequence that they occur. Even in such cases however, you should keep in mind that merely recounting them as a narrative does not constitute discussion, analysis, or evaluation.

7. If the question asks you to analyse a series of events, you should split the account into its most important topics. Each one of these elements might be identified in turn – and then analysed. Resist the temptation to get caught up into the ‘story’.

8. Essays dealing with history or political issues of the past are normally and most logically written in the past tense.

Within six weeks of the revolution Cossack armies and other ‘white’ forces were already mustering in south-eastern Russia; the Ukraine, egged on by French and British promises, was in a state of all but open hostilities against the Soviet power; the Germans, in spite of the armistice, were a standing threat in the west.

E.H. Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution 1917-1923: Volume One, Penguin: 1984, p.167

9. Some people try to give a sense of vividness or urgency to their writing by re-casting narratives in the present tense. The result can seem modish and posturing. This should be avoided in academic writing.

Here is the last example, re-cast into what’s called the ‘dramatic present’ tense.

Within six weeks of the revolution Cossack armies and other ‘white’ forces are already mustering in south-eastern Russia; the Ukraine, egged on by French and British promises, is in a state of all but open hostilities against the Soviet power; the Germans, in spite of the armistice, are a standing threat in the west.

© Roy Johnson 2003

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New Hart’s Rules

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style and text-presentation rules for writers and editors

New Hart’s Rules started its life as the house style rule book for editorial principles at Oxford University Press. It was written by Horace Henry Hart who was Printer to the Press, and first published in 1893 as quite a slim volume. But it has become so popular ever since that it grew in size and eventually reached a thirty-ninth edition. Now it has been enlarged even further and completely re-cast in a new format, adapted from The Oxford Guide to Style, but retaining much of the content and the spirit of the old Hart’s Rules.

New Hart's Rules The guide deals with the typographic details of assembling writing ready for its appearance in printed form. This includes punctuation, capitalization, italicization, abbreviations, and the presentation of numbers. The latest edition also has completely new chapters covering law and legal references, tables, illustrations, indexing, plus copyright and other publishing responsibilities. Each chapter has been given far more illustrative examples.

For instance, my edition of the old 39th edition has less than 200 pages: this new version has more than 400. The beauty of this book – in common with other style guides which have become classics – is that it quickly establishes the general rule, then all further examples are the difficult, awkward, and obscure cases. For those people endlessly puzzled by spelling-checkers, there is an explanation of the rules governing -ise and -ize. OUP have always favoured -ize, so surprisingly it’s criticize yet compromise, and agonize yet televise.

The principles underlying the need for consistent conventions remain as important as ever. The presentation of money, time, dates, and even the points of the compass are included, as well as temperature, Latin plant and animal names, capitalization of titles, word breaks (hyphenation) and such wonderfully arcane details as the need for a possessive ‘s’ in Roman following an italicized title – as in the Dreadnought‘s crew.

There’s an explanation of proof correction (with examples) and a guide to punctuation, symbols, and the presentation of scientific equations and formulae. Then in the centre of the book there is a section dealing with the alternate spellings of ‘difficult’ words (colander, haemorrhoids, skiing) then a very useful explanation of the rules on the tricky issue of doubling consonants at word endings (billeted, compelled, travelling) and plurals formed in non-English words (bacilli, errata, matrices).

Hart then takes on the topic of language change in listing those words which have progressed from compounds to single words (a process which is usually faster in the US than the UK) – antifreeze, lifetime, tonight – though it is hard for a book of this type to keep up with contemporary developments in this respect. Do we write word processor, word-processor, or wordprocessor, for instance? However, Hart has no hesitation in recommending birth-rate, copy-book, and test-tube.

Guidance on how to deal with foreign languages include sections on French, German, Italian, and Russian – plus Welsh, Dutch and Afrikaans which have been added in the latest edition.

The latter part of the book includes a complete checklist of topics to be covered in preparing a book for publication: text, footnotes, illustrations, bibliographies, tables, and even how to deal with plays and poetry. And finally, since it’s quite hard to locate items in such a tightly-compacted work of reference, there’s an excellent index.

This is a source for anyone interested in the preparation of text for print. If you have a research paper, an article, or a book which you hope will see light of day as a publication, then do yourself a favour and buy this marvelous guide to the small details which make all the difference between an amateurish and a properly edited piece of writing.

© Roy Johnson 2005

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New Hart’s Rules, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005, pp.417, ISBN: 0198610416

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New Oxford Spelling Dictionary

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spellings, hyphens, capitals, and presentation of terms

Unlike a conventional dictionary, the New Oxford Spelling Dictionary lists words without giving their definitions. So – you might well ask – if there are no explanations of meanings, what information does such a book contain? Quite a lot, as it turns out. For instance, it shows distinctions between words which might easily be confused – as in hare/hair – and it also indicates grammatical parts of speech – as in double fault used as a noun and double-fault used as a verb.

New Oxford Spelling Dictionary It also makes firm recommendations where there are variants in possible spellings (use judgement), shows where capitals are required in names, gives American spellings, and shows where logical word breaks occur for hyphenation and compounds. Entries run from aa (lava) and Aachen (which used to be Aix-la-Chapelle) to zymotic and zymurgy. This particular guidance makes it an ideal reference tool for those working with printed or word-processed text.

The reference data is based on the reputable scholarship of the Oxford Dictionary of English. It contains over 110,000 words and names, and in the latest edition includes a large number of compound words as well as very basic information about people and places. So, for instance, Enver Hoxha is the Albanian prime minister, and Santa Catarina is a Brazilian state.

A typical entry on proper nouns shows the variants on a personal name, with the pipe (these things – || -) showing the word breaks.

Kath|er|ine also
Cath|ar|ine,
Cath|er|ine,
Cath|ryn,
Kath|ar|ine,
Kath|ryn

And the same presentation of typical word is rendered thus:

tar|tar + s
(deposit on teeth etc.;
violent-tempered person;
in ‘cream of tartar’.
‡ tartare, ta-ta)

This last detail is an injunction that the term should not be confused with tartare or goodbye.

Of course you still need some idea of how a word is spelled (or spelt) in order to look it up. But this dictionary makes the job less distracting than using a normal dictionary, because it eliminates all that interesting stuff. Less may not be more, but it’s certainly faster.

This will be of most interest to authors, editors, proofreaders or typesetters, for whom it provides an ideal way to ensure the best spelling practice working on any sort of text – newspapers, magazines, reports, theses, or even websites. It has also been produced to team up neatly with the New Oxford Dictionary for Writers and Editors and New Hart’s Rules to form an ideal reference set.

© Roy Johnson 2005

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New Oxford Spelling Dictionary, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005, pp.596, ISBN: 0198608810

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New Oxford Style Manual

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compendium of writing skills PLUS  specialist dictionary

This New Oxford Style Manual is the result of putting together in one volume the Oxford Guide to Style [formerly Hart’s Rules] and the Oxford Dictionary for Writers and Editors. It starts from ‘parts of the book’ then moves on to punctuation, names, capitals, and numbers. The editor covers all other aspects of text presentation – such as how you should deal with music, mathematics, quotations, lists, tables, and even illustrations. There is even a special section on foreign languages which begins with the thorny issue of UK and American English – but it also covers Latin, European, Asiatic, Classical, and even Sanskrit.

New Oxford Style Manual Works such as this reveal the small but important conventions which academics, journalists, and professional writers need to know – but which are hard to remember. How do you punctuate a reference given in a footnote for instance? How are abbreviations shown in foreign languages? Where do spaces go when showing degrees of temperature? It deals with special subjects, plus linguistics and phonetics, translations, audio and visual broadcasts, and electronic data. In addition, it also incorporates the most recent changes in citing digital media, and details on the submission of materials for publication.

The second part of the book is a specialist dictionary for writers, journalists, and text-editors. It offers rulings on words and spellings which are commonly problematic. For instance, do we write Muslim or Moslem, customise or customize? It covers the names of well-known people and places, foreign words and commonly-used phrases such as petit-bourgeois and persona non grata.

The editor Robert Ritter also covers abbreviations, capitalization and punctuation. Only today, I’ve looked up amendment [one ‘m’] superseded [yes – it is spelt with an ‘s’] and manageable [it keeps the ‘e’]. It can also be used as a quick guide to many niceties of writing (the difference between hyphens and dashes) and as a potted encyclopedia for historical names (and their dates).

It should certainly be amongst the reference tools of anybody who takes a serious interest in writing. The single volume is even 25% cheaper than buying the two books separately. Fantastic value. Make sure you get the new revised edition which has materials gleaned from OUP’s latest researches into the Oxford English Corpus – a gigantic database containing hundreds of millions of words in current and historic use.

© Roy Johnson 2012

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Robert M. Ritter (ed), The Oxford Style Manual, Oxford: Oxford University Press, new second edition 2012, pp.861, ISBN: 0198605641

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Numbers in essays

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1. A general rule for the presentation of numbers (excluding those dealing with science and mathematics) is that numbers below a hundred are written, and numbers above one hundred are presented by digits:

four brown horses ten years old
she is twenty-two 3,500 tonnes of coal
286 casualties 200 metres long

2. Notice that numbers expressed in more than a single word are hyphenated:

thirty-six     ninety-eight     fifty-five

3. Even above one hundred, round numbers are often expressed as words:

one thousand     two million     three billion

4. However, very large numbers are often expressed in a combination of figures and units of millions or billions:

Social benefit payments were running at $7.8 million per day compared with only $5.6 million a year ago.

5. Where two different series of quantities are being discussed, it may clarify matters if words are used for one series and numbers for the other:

Ten wards in the county emergency hospital contained 16 beds each, but fifteen others contained as many as 30.

6. The following example taken from a piece of journalism illustrates this general rule with mention of numbers both below and above one hundred.

One of the nuclear weapons systems would be a four-boat Trident strategic missile fleet with 512 warheads compared with the 192 urged by Labour and the Liberal Democrats to match the numbers in the Polaris fleet it replaces.

7. Do not begin sentences with a numeral (such as 46 or 107). Either rearrange the sentence, or write out the number (as Forty-six or One hundred and seven).

8. Decimals and percentages should be expressed in figures, and the word ‘percent’ should be written out, except in scientific writing:

With interest currently running at 8 percent, the total monthly repayment figure would be almost $2.5 million.

9. When expressing dates before the Christian era, remember to put the numbers of the earlier date first, and give the later date in full to avoid confusion:

Nebuchadnezzar (1792-1750 BC) not Nebuchadnezzar (1792-50 BC)

10. Dates after the Christian era should be expressed in the same way, but with the era written first:

Nebuchadnezzar (1792-1750 BC) but Pope Sixtus III (AD 432-440)

11. The use of Roman numerals is normally confined to the names of monarchs and popes, for the acts of plays, and for the volumes and subdivisions of books:

Edward VI Pope Pius IV
Othello III.iv.18 Chapter XII
Part III Act V, Sc 3

12. In numbers above a thousand or more, the thousands are marked off with a comma:

10,000 BC     1,500 metres

13. Notice that the plurals of numbers are formed by the addition of s alone. The apostrophe is not required:

in the 1920s     pilots of 747s

© Roy Johnson 2003

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Numbers, Tables, and Charts

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practical guidance on the visual presentation of data

Have you ever seen a document containing numbers, tables, and charts – and been unable to understand the information being displayed. Of course you have; and the fault is not yours. The data has simply not been presented effectively. This book deals with the data presentation skills required to show numbers, tables, and graphs in documents and presentations. Many people assemble their data honestly enough when writing reports and giving presentations, but they often do so without thinking how incomprehensible it might be to the audience.

Numbers, Tables, and ChartsOxford University Press have just brought out a series of beginner’s manuals on communication skills. The emphasis is on no-nonsense advice directly related to everyday life. The authors show you how to present numerical data to make its outcomes more self-evident and more easily digestible. This is done by putting figures into a logical order, adding focus to the data, and using layout to guide the reader’s eye towards what is significant.

They cover how to design tables. It’s amazing how much clearer these can be made by removing unnecessary grid lines, aligning numbers and column headings, creating clear titles and headings, and removing any ‘chart junk’.

Graphs should be uncluttered, simple, non-misleading in terms of scale and numbers, and used to illustrate a clear message.

They show how to construct graphs and bar charts so that they immediately reveal the significance of the data they contain. There are also examples of when to use pie charts, scattergrams, and pictographs (small icons)

There’s also useful writing skills advice on how to integrate numbers and statistics into the text of documents. For instance, don’t start sentences with figures or digits, and how to mix the use of words and digits to clarify meaning, as in nine 6-inch rulers and three 5-a-side football matches.

Most presentation of data is these days done using office software packages, so it’s good that they give this a mention, with tips for creating good handouts.

They finish with a case study which tracks the raw data of some school exam results from gathering to final presentation. The grades and numbers can be presented in different ways, and the head teacher must choose the best way for a meeting with the governors.

The chapters of this book are short, but almost every page is rich in hints and tips. The strength of this approach is that it avoids the encyclopedic volume of advice which in some manuals can be quite frightening. This is a book which will reassure those who need it.

The all-time star in this field is Edward Tufte, on whose work they draw substantially. I was glad to see him listed in the bibliography. This is a cheap and cheerful version of the same layout principles he promotes in his beautifully designed books.

© Roy Johnson 2003

Numbers, Tables, and Charts   Buy the book at Amazon UK

Numbers, Tables, and Charts   Buy the book at Amazon US

Sally Bigwood and Melissa Spore, Presenting Numbers, Tables, and Charts, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003, pp.144, ISBN: 0198607229

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On Writing Well

by

best-selling guide to sharpening your writing style

William Zinsser is professional journalist (former writer and editor on the New York Herald Tribune) who manages to express a love of writing and an appreciation of good style without ever dragging readers into the swamps of grammatical nit-picking and rule-governed instruction. In On Writing Well he expresses himself in an urbane and conversational style typical of popular magazines. This is a reassuring approach for those who want a guided tour of writing issues, held by the hand of someone experienced in the craft. It’s rather like having a writing coach at your shoulder as he talks you through what writers think and the decisions they make.

On Writing Well He’s particularly alert to the fear of those who lack confidence. The first part of the book is taken up with his principal recommendations. These are to cultivate brevity and clarity, and to omit any form of ‘clutter’. He has some wonderful examples of equivocation, ambiguity, and deliberate obfuscation drawn from American public life – including such gems from Alexander Haigh as “at this juncture of maturization” [that is ‘now’] and “We must push this to a lower decibel of public fixation. I don’t think there’s much of a learning curve to be achieved in this area of content.”

He then covers the means by which this clarity is to be achieved. It involves, logically enough, choosing your words carefully, and developing a unity of approach and subject matter.

The third part of the book deals with different forms of writing – such as reportage, interviews, and travel writing. It also covers scientific writing, business and even sports. These chapters are aimed at aspiring journalists, but there’s much to be learned from such details as his sharp-eyed analysis of the travel cliché: ‘villages nestling‘ and ‘byways half-forgotten‘:

Half the sights seen in a day’s sightseeing are quaint, especially windmills and covered bridges

The latter part of the book relaxes into its real subject – journalism – on which Zinsser speaks with feeling about its craft and techniques. In fact he ends by giving a paragraph-by-paragraph account of writing a travel article, explaining the subject options, the choice of vocabulary, and the strategies of approach which he tried and rejected. There’s a certain amount of patting himself on the back after-the-event in this, but aspiring writers might find it interesting to be taken through the generation of a piece of work in this way.

At its best, this approach will make readers sensitive to the effects they produce, and at its weakest it’s like a well-written guidebook on ‘How to Write Stories for Magazines’. But on balance, more people are likely to improve their writing by becoming conscious of rhythm and structure than are likely to fall into the abyss of verbal entertainment which fails.

© Roy Johnson 2006

On Writing Well   Buy the book at Amazon UK

On Writing Well   Buy the book at Amazon US

William Zinsser, On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction (6th edn), New York: Harper, 2006, pp.336, ISBN: 141775057X

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