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This week's subject is capitalization
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Were you someone's valentine or Valentine last week? Here's how you answered last week's quiz: Even though the holiday is capitalized, you can lowercase references to your sweetheart. That doesn't mean you need to minimize your affection, though π Capitalization is one of those tricky subjects where the rules aren't always cut-and-dried. In fact, the celebration with your valentine might have overlapped with another holiday that prompts Stylebot subscribers to ask about capitalization. When long weekends created by holidays such as Presidents' Day are approaching, Stylebot subscribers often ask about capitalizing "weekend." Those questions prompted our team to update our style guide entries on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Presidents' Day, Memorial Day, Labor Day and Thanksgiving to note that "weekend" should be lowercase. As you saw last week, we're moving on from quizzing you on commonly confused words. But if you still want more, you can take this quiz. You said you wanted harder questions in this newsletter, so here's one that typically stumps people:
We cover the concept behind this one in our grammar guide. Download it for free here. Bonus points if you noticed a reference to the concept in the subject and preview lines of this email π§ β€ Team Stylebot
π A tip a weekIf someone forwarded you this email, subscribe here to get one writing tip a week in your inbox. π¬ Get reliable, ethical writing advice at your fingertipsImproving your writing means making better choices every day. Stylebot makes it easy with our Slack, Teams and Google Chrome extensions. Try Stylebot for free today. π About StylebotStylebot helps media professionals save time without sacrificing quality by answering editing questions on Slack, Microsoft Teams and Google Chrome. We're on a mission to make editing faster, easier and more fun β¨ Learn more about Stylebot or follow us Instagram, X or LinkedIn.
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Hone your writing skills and never use "hone in" again. Get writing tips, have fun with words and learn something new in a one-minute read each week by signing up for Stylebotβs newsletter.
Happy Friday...the 13th. Most of you got the right answer on last week's quiz. Just as you spell out one through nine and use numerals for 10 and higher, you do the same for ordinals. So this month we have Friday the 13th, and next month we'll have July Fourth. You got a peek at our Google Docs extension last week, and this week we're excited to share another great review: "Style Guide Checker is a great product that provides a second set of eyes to catch things that often go overlooked. Not...
Whether you use "kitty" or "catty" before "corner" to describe something that is diagonally opposite, you're not talking about cats. In fact, the origin of "kitty-corner" is more closely related to dice π² π² That wasn't an option on last week's quiz, and we didn't trick you by giving you the option to pick "cats." Most of you guessed "diagonal," and while that is part of the word's meaning now, the origin of "kitty-corner" goes back to the French word meaning "four." English speakers adapted...
Did you see any flags flying at half-staff on Memorial Day? What about at half-mast? These terms are often used interchangeably to describe flags that are flown only halfway up the flagpole, and the answers to last week's quiz on the terms were pretty evenly split. We probably should have added an "it depends" answer choice, though. Everyone technically got it right, but we recommend using "half-staff" as the default term, as it's what's used for flags on land. Reserve "half-mast" for flags...