Style Guide

Please respect the following style and spelling rules when you submit a story to Never Was.

Spelling

  • Use the American English spelling.
  • Spell out numbers up to 21 as well as large round numbers (“sixteen”, “thirty”).
  • For percentages, use numerals and spell out “percent.” Omit the 0 if less.
  • Capitalize art movements (“Art Deco”), but not genres (“steampunk”).

Titles

  • Capitalize all words in the title except: and, but, for, or, articles and prepositions.
  • Italicize the titles of publications, including albums, books, films, magazines and newspapers.
  • Titles of articles, songs and TV episodes take quotation marks.
  • Also italicize foreign words except geographical entities and names.

Punctuation

  • Avoid hyphens where possible. For example: policymaker, not policy-maker.
  • Em dashes, which are formed by typing two hyphens, take additional whitespace on either side.
  • Do not use the serial (Oxford) comma before the conjunction in a series.
  • Abbreviations and acronyms usually do not require periods.

Abbreviations

  • We use abbreviations for most terms that are longer than two words or when the abbreviation is (more) commonly used.