Do not abbreviate city names.
- New York City, not NYC (New York is OK, on second reference).
- Los Angeles, not LA.
- San Francisco, not SF.
Exception: Abbreviations are OK in entry tags — NYC, SF, LA
DATELINE CITIES
Certain cities are so well-known that they do not need to be accompanied by state names. They are:
- Atlanta
- Baltimore
- Boston
- Chicago
- Cincinnati
- Cleveland
- Dallas
- Denver
- Detroit
- Honolulu
- Houston
- Indianapolis
- Las Vegas
- Los Angeles
- Miami
- Milwaukee
- Minneapolis
- New Orleans
- New York
- Oklahoma City
- Philadelphia
- Phoenix
- Pittsburgh
- St. Louis
- Salt Lake City
- San Antonio
- San Diego
- San Francisco
- Seattle
- Washington: Because Washington is a dateline city that stands alone without the “D.C.,” writers using AP style often must clarify in text when they’re referring to “Washington state.”
For a list of commonly misspelled food-personality and product names, visit: People and Products
The ellipsis has sprung up like a weed in online discourse. Avoid it except in situations in which you are omitting quoted material.
Use an ellipsis to indicate the deletion of one or more words in condensing quotes, texts, and documents. Be especially careful to avoid deletions that would distort the meaning.
Leave one space on both sides of an ellipsis: I … tried to do what was best.
If the words that precede an ellipsis constitute a grammatically complete sentence, either in the original or in the condensation, place a period at the end of the last word before the ellipsis. Follow it with a space and an ellipsis: I no longer have a strong enough political base. …
In Movable Type, tags are separated by commas. You can therefore—and should—use multiple words separated by spaces: peanut butter, not peanutbutter
Use the plural form: hot dogs, not hot dog; books, not book
Capitalize proper nouns: California, Jeffrey Steingarten, Taillevent — not california, jeffrey steingarten, or taillevent
Use the simplest form of the tag: cookbooks — not fish cookbooks
Don’t overtag. As of publication of this post, there are more than 4,300 tags in the Serious Eats MT system. To optimize the system, I need your help in keeping tags lean and logical.
online
When talking about something on the internet, it’s one word, no hyphen.
on line
When talking about people in a queue, use in line. On line in this context is a New York–ism.
on-line
INCORRECT. Do not use.
It’s a judgment call on your part when to use blockquotes, but in general, use them for any quoted material you’re blogging that goes beyond a sentence or two.
EXAMPLES
Johnson said:
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Duis mi. Donec nunc leo, vestibulum sit amet, pretium dictum, auctor vitae, mi. Nunc non libero id sem mattis volutpat. Aenean vel dolor et dui egestas bibendum.
But Wales said:
Vestibulum volutpat, pede vel faucibus laoreet, magna leo fermentum enim, molestie vulputate sem tortor vitae lectus. Curabitur eu ante vitae magna pulvinar porta. Nullam accumsan. Proin porttitor mattis arcu. Proin blandit ornare risus. Suspendisse iaculis velit. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit.
Curabitur cursus tortor eget est nonummy scelerisque. Sed aliquet mi et nisi. Aliquam velit sapien, vestibulum eget, scelerisque at, pulvinar in, erat. Nunc nisl tellus, euismod ut, elementum in, dictum sed, purus.
Yeah. I know, right? They can never agree on anything.
HOW TO CODE BLOCKQUOTES
SINGLE PARAGRAPHS #
Note the spacing and placement of HTML tags. It is very important.
Johnson said:
<blockquote><p>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Duis mi. Donec nunc leo, vestibulum sit amet, pretium dictum, auctor vitae, mi. Nunc non libero id sem mattis volutpat. Aenean vel dolor et dui egestas bibendum.</p></blockquote>
But Wales said:
See how there is one line break before and after the blockquoted material? You need those there, otherwise the formatting goes to seed.
TWO OR MORE GRAFS #
Note the spacing and placement of HTML tags. It is very important. Also note that though there are two paragraphs here, all the text and coding runs together without line breaks between the two grafs. To break the paragraphs in what will appear on the site, you have to hard-code in <p> and </p> tags.
But Wales said:
<blockquote><p>Vestibulum volutpat, pede vel faucibus laoreet, magna leo fermentum enim, molestie vulputate sem tortor vitae lectus. Curabitur eu ante vitae magna pulvinar porta. Nullam accumsan. Proin porttitor mattis arcu. Proin blandit ornare risus. Suspendisse iaculis velit. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit.</p><p>Curabitur cursus tortor eget est nonummy scelerisque. Sed aliquet mi et nisi. Aliquam velit sapien, vestibulum eget, scelerisque at, pulvinar in, erat. Nunc nisl tellus, euismod ut, elementum in, dictum sed, purus.</p></blockquote>
Yeah. I know, right? They can never agree on anything.
See how there is one line break before and after the blockquoted material? You need those there, otherwise the formatting goes to seed.
The basic guidelines for quotation marks:
FOR DIRECT QUOTATIONS
To surround the exact words of a speaker or writer when reported in a blog post:
- “I have no intention of eating here,” he said
- “I do not object,” he said, “to the prospect of dessert.”
- William Grimes said, “If clowns had a cuisine, this would be it.”
- A diner said the pizza at Roma was “fine in a pinch.”
QUOTES WITHIN QUOTES
Alternate between double quotation marks and single marks:
- She said, “I quote from his letter, ‘I agree with Kipling that “the female of the species is more deadly than the male,” but the phenomenon is not an unchangeable law of nature,’ a remark he did not explain.”
- Use three marks together if two quoted elements end at the same time: She said, “He told me, ‘I love you.’”
PLACEMENT WITH OTHER PUNCTUATION
Follow these long-accepted printers’ rules:
- The period and the comma always go within the quotation marks.
- The dash, the semicolon, the question mark, and the exclamation point go within the quotation marks when they apply to the quoted matter only. They go outside when they apply to the whole sentence.
DIALOGUE OR CONVERSATION
Each person’s words, no matter how brief, are placed in a separate paragraph, with quotation marks at the beginning and the end of each person’s speech:
“I’d like a table for two at 8 p.m.”
“We only have 5:30 and 10.”
“Really?”
“Yeah.”
“Then 5:30, please.”
See also BLOCKQUOTES
Apply the guidelines listed here to book titles, magazine titles, movie titles, opera titles, play titles, album titles, television program titles, and the titles of works of art.
- Capitalize the principal words, including prepositions of four or more letters.
- Capitalize an article — the, a, an — or words of fewer than four letters if it is the first or last word in a title.
- Italicize the names of all such works except the Bible and books that are primarily catalogs of reference material. In addition to catalogs, this category includes almanacs, directories, dictionaries, encyclopedias, gazetteers, handbooks, and similar publications.
- Translate a foreign title into English unless a work is known to the American public by its foreign name.
Use initial caps on all words except articles and conjunctions of four or fewer letters. Example: Going to Sea with the Young Man
Titles that would otherwise take italics (books; magazines; newspapers; seagoing vessels, aircraft, and spacecraft) should receive single quotes in titles
Be mindful of headline length. You should strive to keep headlines to a depth of one line when published. Check your titles after they appear on the site. Under no circumstances should a title be more than two lines deep; that just looks crazy.
Serious Eats uses the serial comma—that is, the comma before the “and” in a series of words.
Peas, corn, and carrots not peas, corn and carrots