italicization for latin /et al/ in technical writing

I'd certainly italicize "et al." "Ad infinitum" isn't really standard English over here, so I'd probably italicize it if I ever used it, which I don't recall having done in print.

And the full stop after 'et al' is super important. 'T'aint me and my old pal Al.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Just use plain English, e.g. "forever" or "with no limit".

Latin is for try-hards who want to look smarter. I.e. most academics.

Clifford Heath.

Undefined acronyms are another academic favorite.

"Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent."

Danke,

By that rationale, you should avoid words with four or more syllables, like the former President Trmp.

Well, Latin comes from Italy...

lol. Towers lean there too.

Haha — I totally agree. That's why I don't know if it will ever make further although "ad infinitum" was my first thought when sketching a first draft. But it did make me ask the question.

It came up with a description explaining how HPF prototypes naturally morph into BPF—for distributed filters such as edge-coupled—when using the Richards transformation. "Spectrum" for dc-2*f_R repeats ad infinitum every 2*f_R... or something like that of me talking to me. I doubt it would make the cut, for exactly the reason you state.

Thank you... Just looking for opinions. My typography book frowns on overuse of emphasis. That is, if I did use it I felt as though I had to justify emphasis. I guess this is the first time I've looked it up.

Writing is not my native element--I must check everything I do. It's a struggle. :)

Thank you, Don. et al and ibid (depending on bib style) are sort of inevitable because they show up in the bibliography.

Ultimately it's about making it easy for the reader. Whatever that takes, I'll do it if I know it. I don't want to annoy them, which is hard for me. lol

Occasionally I suppose emphasis is called for. Interesting note about the tagging. Can't say I've done it. I use LaTeX, but am not an expert.

I often use italics for a different purpose: If I have two sentences that are very similar, like sentences summarizing very similar (except for one thing) cases, I will italicize the critical word or phrase that changes between the cases, so people are drawn directly to the critical difference. instead of missing it, buried an all those words.

Even if one is a good writer, it's still a whole lotta work to get it exactly right, with draft after draft.

Joe Gwinn

Interesting. I don't come across that issue too much. I am not sure why. But your usage seems justified.

I suppose I am conflating emphasis with font style for foreign language. The font style is the same for each.

"Good" to hear others share my pain. lol.

If there is one thing I very much regret sandbagging in grade school, and on through high school, it is not having taken advantage of the opportunity to learn English. I have been paying for that mistake for decades. I thought it was "illogical" and "not worth my time." Wrong.

👍

I have a couple copies of CMOS. Another one I like is /Words into Type/. It is dated and won't always be timely, but there is still a lot of good stuff in it.

I do conversational stuff like "we have ... <equation>" ... because I find it pointlessly strenuous to do otherwise.

Yeah.... I like the free tool and I just could not take Word anymore. I actually like LaTeX quite a bit. Word is really just a scratchpad tool. It isn't pro.

This may be possible in LaTeX. I don't know.

I edit a magazine which has a convention that the first paragraph of an article is in the form of an introduction or an explanation of what is to follow. To make that stand out as 'different' it has always been set in italics. A problem arises when that paragraph contins Latin - which then has to be typest in 'normal' text to emphasise that it is different from different.

A furhther complication arises because book titles and some proper nouns are also set in Italics to make them stand out as 'not just part of the sentence'.

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When I took over editorship of the magazine, it was using a Roman font for headings and San-serif for body text. I reversed this for the reasons you have given above. Also, 'Times' is more legible at smaller point sizes than any other font I have found, so that is the preferred Roman body font for long articles on small page sizes.

For body text that is a long quote (such as from a document or book) I use 'New York', another Roman font, but at 95% character width and with slightly inset margins. It fits in with the general appearance but is quite clearly a different block of text from the ordinary body of the article.

I very very rarely use text boxes to expand on a particular concept. Often a diagram is needed for the explanation, so I put the necessary text into a caption with the drawing. Just occasionally I use 'bastard setting' around a picture (I'm sorry, I don't know what the American equivalent is for this terminology). Used sparingly it gives the layout a professional feel and I have always had favourable comments about it from readers.

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My deputy editor and proof-reader has a very strong aversion to underlining; it probably works well in technical articles, but isn't really suitable for more general-interest magazine text.

Sod's Law: "is to coney meaning" has a typo. :-)

Disdain /à la/ Bloggs.

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I'm not sure how that helps the reader; but I've not tried it as the magazine has always used justified text to give equal-length lines.

Now that is a real problem with this magazine. It uses A5 'portrait' page size printed 2-up on A4 'landscape' sheets, folded and stapled. The width of A5 'portrait' is just a bit too wide for a single column to be comfortable because the eye has difficulty finding the start of the next line. Splitting it into two columns, minus the width of the page gutter and the column gutter, leaves almost no space for the text, so the lnes become too short and making sense of long sentences becomes very difficult.

On the centre page spread , which covers A4 width with no central gutter, I have sometimes used three columns, which looks about right, but I prefer to reserve this special page for large pictures which benefit from being reproduced at full size (albeit with a couple of staples showing through).

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I lay it up in PageMaker 6.5, which has every tool imaginable and is an absolute pig to use. Some of the most commonly used commands, like switching between text and layout tools ought to have keyboard shortcuts

- but if they have, there is nothing in the manual about them and I haven't found them in 20 years of struggling with the program.

The conventional keyboard shortcuts for Bold, Italic etc. don't work, they bring up unwanted 'features' that would be best relegated to the depths of some obscure and little-used branch of a menu tree. The only thing in its favour is that I've seen others that are worse.

That is where I find the old Mac system (OS 8.6) scores. The 'native' interchange format is PICT, which handles all sorts of other formats without losses. I can dump a JPEG or a spreadsheet or text into the drawing section of Claris Works and add any geometric shapes and text I want, then export that as a PICT into Photoshop to generate the EPS format that works best in PageMaker. A lot of the diagrams and drawings in the magazine are originated in Claris Works at double size or bigger, they then give crisp images when reduced to a size that fits the magazine page.

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That's a little too artsy for our magazine, which is hovering between a newsletter and a proper journal.

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That's the key to it - it all depends on the line length. I've never stopped to analyse it before, but you have hit the nail on the head there.

We are very short of space on most issues, so every millimetre of width is needed.

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Yes. A friend, who was a properly trained printer of the old school, gave me a thorough grounding in the use of white space - but it is a luxury in a small magazine.

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I have done that in some editions, it all depends on the aspect ratio of the centre-spread picture.

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PageMaker does threading but it is easy to loose the continuity when it crashes (which it does all too frequently). The work in progress should be saved often and under different filenames,.so you can back-track when it all falls apart or refuses to open.

You are dealing with a very different animal there.

Claris Works does that easily but PageMaker is much more restricted and less intuitive. Actually the whole magazine would be far easier to lay out in Claris Works but for the fact that it doesn't allow cropping of photographs. That's the only thing preventing me from using it.

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The idea is to have each edition coloured differently, following the spectrum, so that they appear as a rainbow on the shelf. Originally I wanted to use a two-colour scheme to encode the issue number, using the resistor colour code*, but I found this was impractical for various reasons.

[* Just to keep the thread on-topic.]

The ordinary one (A.G.M.) is annually at about the same date and is a legal obligation for a Registered Charity. The extraordinary one has become necessary to thrash out a number of issues that have arisen recently and must be sorted in order to present the next A.G.M. with a considered plan to vote on. An E.G.M. is usually a sign that a society is in chaos.

This issue was particularly 'tight' ; there was a lot of accumulated material because publication had been badly delayed (by chaos). My template has more leading, but I found myself reducing it in nearly every article, just to get everything in without squeezing the pictures down to postage stamps.

There are back issues at: <

and you will see that some of them are a bit less cramped. i would love to e able to use more leading, but doing that for just one article would make all the others look cramped.

Good points, I'll try them out and see if I like the look of them.

Lack of space, I'm afraid. I've seen it in other publications and it does look much better.

I do that if there are any references or footnotes, but not for the page numbers.

The other place I use a line under an article is when it is written by the Editor (me). Normally I indicate the end of an article with the author's name in block capitals and right-justified, but tradition says the Editor does not sign his or her own articles, so the underline is the way of indicating the end.

That was a slip-up that went un-noticed.

The colours were originally used for the 'Events' web-page and had to show up well on a pale blue background. I decided to use the same colours in the printed publication to avoid confusion - which meant that they weren't necessarily the optimum colours on a white page.

If you look at the corresponding pages in the back-issues, you will see what has happened. Originally we didn't list the Combe Hay work parties but the leader of that group has asked us to publicise them. This means a huge increase in the number of events listed and, if I had stuck to our previous format, they would have swamped all the other events and the list wouldn't have fitted on the page. Instead of repeating the same information each time, I printed it once and then used colour coding to tie it in with the chronological listing. (The use of superscripts, asterisks and daggers was rejected by the deputy editor).

That is an inheritance from the days when this was a photocopied paste-up. There didn't seem to be any reason to change it (a lot of our members are very conservative), so it has stayed in the old format.

Unfortunately it has to include a lot of legal information about Gift Aid (a U.K. tax avoidance scheme for charities) and more recently a legally-required consent section for us to store the names and addresses of our members. It crams in even more information than an average page of the magazine.

Thank you for that. It is nice to know the many hours spent re-working it have achieved the desired effect.

It varies a lot. Some authors are very good, but others send in a list of bullet points and say "Write that up into something people will want to read". One article in this issue was completely 'ghost written', based on a casual conversation, and then sent to the author with a note saying "Is that what you would have written if you had written it?".

In one really bad case a while ago, an author sent in some accompanying photographs that were vital to the article but were lopsided and so lacking in contrast that it was impossible to see the important details even with heavy Photoshopping. I had to work out where they had been taken and which way the camera was pointing (straight into the sun), then drive to the location at a time when I had worked out the light would be right and re-photograph them. The author never spotted what I had done.

It is supposed to be quarterly, but we rarely publish more than three in any year. I would rather wait for good material than send out poor quality 'fillers'. If I stamped my foot and insisted on deadlines, I would get nothing at all. As it is, I finish up writing some of it myself and re-writing many of the submissions.

I usually draw a lot of the maps in Claris Works but the historic one on p.19 was taken from a property ownership map. This meant it was covered in handwritten notes about land ownership and inheritance relating to familes who still live in the area. This sensitive information all had to be Photoshopped out before I could use the map. The 'cloning' tool in PhotoshopLE was very useful for reinstating the features that had been covered by the writing.

The superb map on the back page was drawn by one of our founding members who was a professional draughtsman; sadly he has just died and the next edition will contain an extensive obituary.

I have recived it and will reply by mail.

There are discrete steps of printing and postage costs. A 24-page A5 booklet is all we can budget for. There are no charity postage rates in the UK.

I constantly badger people for articles with no result, then lots of little items pile in shortly after the nominal deadline and we are short of space again. It makes for a more interesting magazine, but usually involves several major changes of layout at short notice.

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PageMaker does it by 'windowing': the document can be moved around under the frame to expose previously hidden portions. Photoshop does it by cropping, which can sometimes be a nuisance.

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We have regular Committee meetings to discuss the general running of the Society, but the E.G.M. is a public event which is advertised in advance to all members.

I can apply those where necessary, but have a small basic set of templates: Body text Intro Quotation Header1 Header 2 Author credit Picture caption Picture credit

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I am shown as the Editor in the Committee listing, but don't sign my contributions. When I write canal articles for other publications it is usually anonymously or under the name of the society. I also write occasional technical magazine articles on a different subject under my own name.

I have to write (and print and bind) manuals for electronic equipment I have designed, but they just go under the name of my company.

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There is a sytem in PageMaker for doing that, but I have never managed to understand it, so I do it manually (with the occasional slip-up, as you spotted).

My brief, on taking over as Editor, was to change the magazine as little as possible - the readers liked it as it was. The first edition I produced on a Mac was only distinguishable from the previous I.B.M. Golf-ball paste up by the improved quality of the photographs, which no longer required sceening.

Several editions later I managed to sort out the Roman/San-Serif muddle without too much opposition, then settled down to keeping the format stable. The layout of the title page was an innovation that I stole from a 1946 edition of Wireless World.

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We have a complicated system for recovering charity memberships and donations from Income Tax, and there are standard legal procedures and wording which have to be followed.

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We now have to have a signed declaration that the person has read our Privacy Statement and agrees to it before we are allowed to keep a note of their name and address. The wording is prescribed by law and the penalties for non-compliance are hefty.

~~~~~~ SECURITY (noun): Something which constantly interferes with legitimate everyday actions whilst having no effect on criminals. ~~~~~~

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...and if I don't, I shall have no article to publish.

I do check with the author before publishig it.

[bad photograph]

The problem is that it reflects badly on the magazine, not on the author.

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Yes, I make it a rule never to publish Part 1 until Part n. is finished. It also makes it a lot easier to work out suitable splitting points if you have the whole thing complete.

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That is partly what the E.G.M. is about. Either younger members step forward and take on some of the load, or the remaining Committee will collapse.

What we don't want is "I know all about websites cause I wrote one once" (It was a template and I just filled it in.) or "I drive the forklift truck in a publisher's warehouse so I know all about magazines" (Tho I never done no gramur at skule).

It is illogical to be sure, as are all natural languages. But my mother beat it into me anyway.

But getting the grammar et al exactly right is not usually the most important problem. It's getting the content and logical development correct.

War story: In the mid 1980s, I had a programmer who was born in mainland China, and had escaped by swimming to Hong Kong, ending up in the Boston, MA area.

His conversational English was workable but very rough. He used this to escape writing tasks. But tech writers don't know enough to write for him, and the other programmers had their own writing assignments to do.

My solution was to have the programmer write his first draft in Chinese if he liked, then translate it into rough English, whereupon a tech writer would swoop in and clean his draft up. But the programmer was required to explain things to the writer until the writer was satisfied - the writer was in effect representing the future audience. Then I introduced the programmer to his newly-appointed tech-writer shadow. The programmer seemed startled.

They were a Mutt-and-Jeff team: The programmer was basketball-player tall, a Manchurian, at 6' 6" and quite thin. The tech writer was a

5'3" male, and not so thin.

Together, they produced a very good document, one that was actually superior to those written by programmers whose native language was English. Especially the ones who think that the best documentation of the code is the code itself.

Joe Gwinn