Month: December 2006

Last week I offered my opinion on the proper use of bold and italics in e-Learning. I wanted to know your opinion. John Laflin, PhD, Professor of English at Dakota State University, Madison, South Dakota was kind enough to offer the following:

I teach courses in software documentation. In each student project I insist that a list of manual conventions be included. (It’s absolutely incredible how many software, hardware, and peripherals manuals do not list any conventions.)

Students are fond of placing any user-generated text in “quotation marks” – e.g. Now type “the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.” I always counsel against this practice as the user should not actually type the quotation marks, and the writer has to tell and remind the user not to do so. The period at the end of the sentence is another concern, but I can get to that later.

So I advise either bold faced type or a color or even a different typeface, such as “Courier” for those bits of text that a user should type. These font changes are not under the user’s control, so there would be little if any confusion about what to type. Line breaks are also useful here, as a writer can minimize confusion by placing a Line Break (and not a paragraph break) before the “and” in the following example:

“Now type: the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog and Press [ENTER].” Some users will be bound to keep typing unless the line ends after the word “dog.”

I certainly have no problem with using bold to indicate menus or whatever; however I would also suggest that the convention help make the writer more efficient. If the writer has said in a conventions page that “words in bold-faced type indicate the names of menus,” the writer does not need to say “Click the File menu.” Instead the writer only needs to say “Click File” as the bold type actually substitutes for the words “the” and “menu.”

Now as for those pesky periods: I allow my students to omit periods that would normally be required when they fall at the ends of sentences that a user needs to type. As with the example above, the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog

This sentence would normally require a period at the end; however putting a period at the end will confuse readers and it’s very hard to see whether or not a period is bold. And of course in the old days of typesetting there was no such thing as a “bold period.” Although the period in the example above is not critical, think about a web address, where a stray period could create a “404 Not Found” error.

Thanks for the opportunity to share.

Great stuff, John, as usual. And thank you.

The rules for quotation marks can get a bit confusing as they are not related to logic in any way. My best advice is to always check the rule before using the quotation marks. Since we don’t use them that often, these rules are not worth memorizing; however, they are worth looking up in a reference book. Put periods and commas inside the closing quotation marks. This is the American style. The American convention for placing commas and periods inside quotation marks offers no logic. If you deal with publications from England or Australia or South Africa, the rules for the quotation mark will differ.

Here are examples of a period and comma with quotation marks:

• The letter was marked “Confidential.”
• She described her new friend as “tall,” “handsome,” and “intelligent.”

Put colons and semicolons outside the closing quotation marks. Again there is no logic to this rule.

Here are examples of quotation marks with colons and semicolons:

• I had my doubts when I heard him say, “Your check is in the mail”; needless to say, I have received nothing.
• We know what she means when she says to use some “ingenuity”: creativity wins proposals.

Use the following patterns for question marks and exclamation points at the end of a sentence concluding with a quotation:

Here are examples of quotation marks with question marks and exclamation points:

• When the quote is not a question, but the sentence is.

  Did they say, “We’ll help”?

• When the quote is a question, but the sentence is not.

  They asked, “May we help?”

• When the quote is a question, and so is the sentence.

  Did they ask, “May we help?”

• When the quote is an exclamation, and the sentence is a question.

  Who yelled, “The sky is falling!”

• When the quote is a question, and the sentence is an exclamation.

  Don’t ask, “Where is the exit”!

Use quotation marks for a direct quote, not for an indirect quotation.

Here’s a direct quote:

The forerunner declared, “My political record shows that I am the best person for the job.”

Here’s an indirect quote:

The forerunner declared that his political record shows that he is the best person for the job.

Note: Single quotes are treated the same way as double quotes.