For More Effective Writing At Any Time

Edit your post for the following:

• Check to see what adjectives, adverbs and descriptive phrases you could leave out without losing your intended effect. (Often these descriptors dilute rather than emphasize. Use strong verbs and nouns instead of adverbs and adjectives.)
• See if there’s anything you can say just as well and usually more effectively with fewer words. See if you can substitute phrases for clauses and strong nouns or verbs for descriptive phrases in order to strengthen your prose.
• As a general rule, use the active voice of verbs rather than the passive voice, when possible.
  “Jeremy broke the window.”
  Not: “The window was broken by Jeremy.” 
• Avoid using frequent or lengthy quotations. They dilute your post. Since there is nothing new under the sun, it is expected that the ideas of others will have influenced your thinking. Just make sure you have digested these ideas to make them your own, and then write them in your own words. If you borrow quite specific ideas, you may need to footnote them. Quotations should generally be quite short.
• Avoid using too many Bible texts. It is better to use one text and use it in such a way that it sticks in the mind than to use many texts like buck shot.
• Make sure your paragraphs are relatively short, about three sentences or 100 words max to make for easier reading. (That is quite different from the way things were 40 or so years ago.)

Punctuation and Font Styling 

Click on image for some basic punctuation rules.

•  Periods and commas always come before an ending quotation mark: He said, “It is good.” NOT He said, “It is good”.
• Question marks and exclamation marks may become before or after an ending quotation mark: If the mark belongs to the quotation, put it before: He asked, “What are you doing here?” If it belongs to the whole sentence, put it after: Did Jesus say, “Deny yourself”?
• Please avoid adding your own styles to sub-headings. Use the headings in the “Paragraph” drop-down menu. That way the post will always look good, even when the overall template is changed.
• You may use the built-in bolding <strong> or italicizing <em> options.
• Do not write anything other than acronyms in ALL CAPITALS.. 
• Use the en-dash for dashes, with a space before and after, instead of hyphens or em dashes. There is a horse-shoe-like icon in the first icon row. Hover over buttons if you have no idea what that is.) This icon gives access to special characters, including the en-dash.
• Bible references are automatically linked to texts on a bible site, providing you format them correctly. 
  Write: “Job 1:6”  not “Job chapter 1 verse 6.” (You may use standard abbreviations for books of the Bible. 
  After citing one reference, please do not go on to refer to verse 11, but give the full reference instead, as in “Job 1:11”
• You can also check out Basic Punctuation Rules Everyone Needs to Know if you need more help. 

Specific Sabbath School Net Style Elements:

•  For titles, capitalize all words except articles, such as “a” or “the.” (The alternative would be to use normal sentence styling: First word and proper nouns are capitalized. I’m open to switching to this style. Please leave a comment below.)
• All references to the Bible or Scripture are capitalized. However adjectives such as “biblical” and “scriptural” are not capitalized.
• All noun references to the Godhead are capitalized. Examples: God, Christ, Jesus, Father, Son, Holy Spirit, Bridegroom, Counselor, Wonderful, etc.
• All pronoun references to the Godhead are similarly capitalized. Examples: He, His, Him.
• The correct spelling and capitalization of our church name is this: Seventh-day Adventist Church. When used as a noun adjective, spell and capitalize it the same way: Seventh-day Adventist school. (Note the lower-case d.)
• When referring to our church either in noun or adjective form, please use the full name in the first reference (i.e. Seventh-day Adventist). In subsequent references “Adventist” is fine. (Previously we allowed SDA in further references  since people search on both variants, with older generations and people from Asia and Africa searching for “SDA,” rather than “Adventist.” What do you think?

Citations / References to outside sources

For most internet references, use the following pattern in parentheses after the quotation or in footnotes:

When citing web pages or blogs, include the following elements:

• Author’s name (if available)
• Date of publication or last modification (if available)
• Title of the webpage or document
• URL (web address)
• Access date (the date you accessed the webpage)
• If no author is available, use the title of the webpage as the author
• Use “clean links.” That is, strip away all the clutter that is included in search results. Experiment with how much you can cut out and still get the same result. 

When citing online documents (reports, documents, magazines, online books, etc.) that do not normally change after publication: 

• In-text citation: (Author’s name, Year, Month Day of publication)
• Reference list entry: Author’s name. (Year, Month Day of publication). Title of document. Retrieved from

Use clean links for online sources:

Example: An article on Billy Graham is entitle “Billy Graham: No Matter What, Exercise Your Right to Vote.”
The URL from a search result is this one: https://billygraham.org/story/billy-graham-no-matter-what-exercise-your-right-to-vote/#:~:text=Our%20world%20will%20never%20be%20perfect%E2%80%94not%20until%20Christ%20returns.%20  That’s a dirty link. 
The clean link is this one: https://billygraham.org/story/billy-graham-no-matter-what-exercise-your-right-to-vote. And that is the link to use in referencing the article. 

Referring to Books in print or Kindle format:

[Note: Normally pages are referenced as “p.” for one page and “pp.” for more than one page. However, that seems to confuse our Scripture reference plugin. So we are resorting to spelling out “page” and “pages.”

Book, with one author
William H. Rehnquist,The Supreme Court: A History, page 204. 
Supreme Court, p. 21.  [For subsequent references to the same book.]

Book, with two or three authors 
Michael D. Coe and Mark Van Stone, Reading the Maya Glyphs, pages 129-30. 

Book, with four or more authors 
Lynn Hunt et al., The Making of the West: Peoples and Cultures, page 541. 

Book, with no known author
The Men’s League Handbook on Women’s Suffrage, page 23. 

Book, edited without an author
Jack Beatty, ed., Colossus: How the Corporation Changed America, page 127.

Book, edited with an author 
Ted Poston, A First Draft of History, ed. Kathleen A. Hauke, page 46.

Book, from a multivolume work 
James M. McPherson, Ordeal by Fire, vol. 2, The Civil War, page 205.
Peter N. Stearns, ed., Encyclopedia of European Social History: From 1350 to 2000, III: 271.

Grammar Review

Verbs: The active voice of verbs is usually more effective than the passive voice:

Write: “Please note”
Not: “It should be noted.

Write: I learned God’s ways as I was growing up
Or possibly: My parents taught me God’s ways when I was growing up.
Not: God’s ways were taught to me when growing up. 

Write: God gave me a great gift.
Not: I was given a great gift by God.

Write: Cats eat fish.
Not: Fish are eaten by cats.

Write: Everybody drinks water.
Not: Water is drunk by everybody.

Correct Use of the Passive Voice:

Passive verbs are not automatically wrong. When used rarely and deliberately, the passive voice serves an important purpose.

o   When you wish to downplay the action or the actor:

Mistakes will be made, and lives will be lost; the sad truth is learned anew by each generation.

Three grams of reagent ‘A’ were added to a beaker of 10% saline solution. (In the scientific world, the actions of a researcher are ideally not supposed to affect the outcome of an experiment; the experiment is supposed to be the same no matter who carries it out.)

o   When the actor is unknown:

The victim was approached from behind and hit over the head with a salami.

o   Don’t use passive verbs simply to avoid using “I.”

Subject and Verb Agreement

• Collective nouns; See What Are Collective Nouns And How Do You Use Them?

Capitalization

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