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.