The Sub-editors are the people who work on the Entries which have been submitted for publication and work them into something suitable for the Approved Guide. Sometimes this involves nothing more than adding a few commas and correcting a spelling or two, so it is not a very difficult task. At times, though, there can be a major amount of reformatting to be done so some entries can take a bit of work.

The Coming Up Page

The Coming Up Page has links to the unedited versions of all the entries being sub-edited, with the Peer Review conversation attached to each.

How to Sub-Edit

Each [Approved] Entry must meet the basic criteria of being factual, written in the third person (with very occasional exceptions), it must make basic good sense and it should be generally very readable.

- the BBC h2g2 Editors

1. Don't sub one of your own entries. Contact the Editors and get them to take it straight back. (Don't hit 'Return to Editors', as this will mark it as completed.)

2. Check if there is already an entry on the subject.

3. Check for copyright infringement. Does it look as if the Entry, or chunks of it, are quoted from another website? If so, notify the Eds by e-mail.

4. Read through the entire Peer Review conversation.

5. Read through the whole thing in GuideML looking for peculiar use of GuideML.

6. Edit the entry, adding intros and sentences to make it flow, correcting the English. If necessary, change the format of the entire Entry.

7. If the Entry is written in American English about an American subject, then leave it in American English. Otherwise, make sure it is all in British English.

8. Check any suspicious and contradictory facts and alter if necessary.

9. Check all the links that were provided by the author. If to h2g2, are they to appropriate Approved Entries? If to external sites, are they suitable? Make sure all external links have appropriate titles in the right margin. If there aren't many links, add more. There should be at least 10 links, unless the subject is so technical that there are no suitable links and so serious that frivolous tangential links are not acceptable.

10. If possible, look at the entry in Mozilla Firefox with View / Character Encoding / Unicode. This will display extended characters as a question mark in a black diamond, which is very easy to spot. Note all of these, then change them to & codes.

11. Optionally, check with the author, but don't wait too long for an answer.

Useful for Sub-Editing

• Writing Guidelines
• Style Guide
• GuideML Clinic
• Approved GuideML
• Subbies' Mess Hall
• Special Characters

Some Technicalities That Never Got Into the Style Page

• Bible references may be:

  • chapter - chapter
  • chapter:verse - chapter:verse
  • chapter:verse-verse

  Note the spaces around the inter-chapter dash but not around the inter-verse dash or around the chapter:verse colon.

• Years don't normally have a comma in them, but if they are bigger than 9999 they should.

• Extremely long words such as Donau­dampfschiffahrts­elektrizitäten­haupt­betriebs­werkbau­unterbeamten­gesellschaft should be broken up with soft hyphens, so that they wrap correctly. This is done with the ­ code at appropriate breaking points.

• Conversations between two people should use blockquotes, with the names of the speakers in bold but not italics and the quotation in italics but not bold. Put a nonbreaking space after the </B> to get over the 'two-tags-in-a-row' bug.

  Pat:   Why did the hedgehog cross the road?
  Mike:   To see his flatmate.
  

• The Style Guide says "Capitalise each major word in titles, headers and subheaders" but it doesn't say exactly what it means by major. From looking at existing Approved Entries, it seems to mean any word other than the 1, 2 and 3-letter connecting words:

  a, an, and, by, in, of, the, to.

Some Easily Confused Words

principal and principle

Principal means first or leading, or a person who is leading. You would say 'The principal is in his office' or 'This is the principal method by which this occurs.

Principle means a standard or rule, a fundamental truth. You would say 'This is the principle on which this system is based'.

comprise - doesn't take "of". Can mean "contains" or "include", or can mean "consists of".

than and then

Americans often confuse these, since they are pronounced the same in American. In British English they are pronounced quite differently and nobody ever confuses them.

The majority of – this can almost always be replaced with most.

Historic and Historical

Historical means 'recorded by history'. Historic means memorable, worthy of note.

Capital and Capitol

Americans use the word 'capitol' to mean a building, often with a dome, which houses the state parliament. They often confuse this with 'capital', the city in which the state parliament meets.

Lie and Lay

The verb to lie does not normally take an object, while the very lay always takes an object. So you can say I lie on the bed, but you would say I lay the pillow on the bed. Don't say "in a few minutes I will lay down" - the correct verb there is "lie". To complicate things, "lay" is also the past tense of "lie". The past tense of "lay" is "laid". Of course, in American English, things are slightly different, and it is acceptable to use "lay" without an object.

Directions

Directions are north, south, east, west, northeast, northwest, southeast and southwest. More accurate directions are rarely needed. Don't split northeast into two words or hyphenate it. The exception is if the name of a place is officially spelled differently. North East Lincolnshire, for example, is spelled that way.

Directions should have lowercase letters, unless the word is part of a title. So you could be driving to the north (a direction), but you could also be driving to the North (a place).