Grammar

“Standard practice in entertainment coverage is never to capitalize a job title except when it starts a sentence. The same goes for every position on a movie set: ‘director Martin Scorsese,’ ‘screenwriter Tina Fey,’ etc.

•Do not use an apostrophe when a word is primarily descriptive rather than possessive: e.g., homeowners association, kids department, teachers college, writers room. [The word is acting more like an adjective than a possessive noun.]

“‘Cis-’ is a Latin prefix meaning ‘on the same side as,’ and is therefore an antonym of ‘trans-.’

Generally, -sized is used to comparatively describe the size of something (e.g., a nickel-sized spider would describe a spider roughly the size of a nickel) and -size to indicate something’s function or utility (e.g., child-size furniture describes furniture meant for the use of children,

Bill Walsh (who I’ve described exclusively as my personal hero since first picking up a copy of his essential text The Elephants of Style: A Trunkload of Tips on the Big Issues and Gray Areas of Contemporary American English

Use ing or an apostrophe + d to create the verb form of an all-capped abbreviation

Exceptions to this: •Corporation or brand names that are pluralized, e.g., General Motors’

generally use Latino rather than Hispanic when a broader term is necessary.

before you find yourself on a dash spree, remember: less Morse code, more English.