Style guide
From LightWiki
Contents |
Common word mispellings
- LightWave (capital W)
- NewTek (capital T)
- Vertex (not vertice)
- Modeler (not Modeller, if referring to the part of LightWave. If referring to a person with that occupation, then modeller or modeler are acceptable).
Prose style
Since this is a wiki devoted to creating tutorials and FAQs for LightWave, it would be good to have some guidelines on how to format your text.
- Always write the complete title of what you are talking about - ie. Surface Editor instead of SE or SurfEd - there will be people reading that need the full name;
- Enclose items in LightWave menus or in the interface, with the Bold tag (three ' in a row);
- Add a keyboard shortcut for everything that has them, and follow these guidelines:
- Use Shift+lowercase letter rather than just an uppercase letter
- Enclose the shortcut in brackets, but there's no need for further explanation;
- Don't put additional spaces: (Shift+x), not (keyboard shortcut: X);
- If in doubt, explain which part of LightWave you are in, especially for beginner tutorials
General writing style
Because this wiki is going to be read and edited by people who speak both sorts of English, the correct one and the bastardised American mutation... :), I say let hang the differences in spelling, no-one should spend time changing them. However, there are certain cases to be considered:
- All dates put in this wiki should be in the format "Date in two digits - Month in three letters - year in two digits" - October 14th in 2005 would be 14-Oct-05
- If you are dealing with single-digit numbers (you have to click 7 times), the number should never be in figures, always letters (so, you have to click seven times). Numbers 10 or higher should be rendered as numbers, not text.
- Always go for an active style where possible:
- "Place the point" rather than
- "The point should be placed"
- Try to avoid abbreviations, slang or net words - I'd rather not have smileys, "lols!" or too much gratuitous punctuation - too many exclamation or question marks, etc.
General English Grammar
- Use fewer when describing something that can be quantified and less when it can't be counted as discrete objects, for instance, it is "fewer bricks, but less sand".
- it's is only ever a contraction of it is. Read your sentence back, if it doesn't seem to need "it is", you can almost certainly get rid of that apostrophe.
- Continuing with the theme of errant apostrophes, never apostrophise words that are plurals of acronyms or abbreviations. It's not CD's if you mean the plural of CD (it is CD's if you mean "belonging to CD").
- There is a problem with their grammar - they're making a lot of mistakes:
- There means in that place/matter/moment in time (there are plenty of other definitions depending on sentence position/adjective or adverbial use, etc.)
- Their means belonging to them
- They're is a contraction of they are
