The Sharp Style Guide

The Sharp Style Guide is an attempt to standardize the "Sharp style" of writing used by Nicole Sharp on NikkiWiki.  The Sharp style introduces nonstandard punctuation that can improve the semantic understanding and readability of text.

These style conventions are suggestions only and may be violated or contradicted depending on context/usage.

double spacing

Each sentence ends in a double space.  This is codified in Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) as ".  " (an en space character entity between the period and spacebar whitespace character).  This provides semantic distinction between periods used for abbreviations (.) versus periods used to end sentences (. ).  Since the extra en space has semantic meaning, the double spacing needs to be hard-coded in the HTML and should not be applied with Cascading Stylesheets (CSS).

quotations

Curly quotes (“” and ‘’) are used to cite words spoken or written by a person.  Curly quotes are codified in HTML as "<q></q>" with the semantic context of a quote from a person.

Straight quotes ("" and '') are used to quote words that are not direct quotes by a person.

Example: She called the cat Max but its name was actually "Pedro".

A period or sentence-ending punctuation mark is always outside of a quote unless the quote itself contains a full sentence.  Technically, quoting a sentence within a sentence should require a double period but the ending period can/should be omitted when it is not ambiguous to do so.

Example with quoted sentence (period inside quote): She said: Hello.  Then she said: Goodbye.

Example with quoted phrase (period outside quote): She said hello.  Then said said goodbye.

Note that in the first example above, a colon is introduced to indicate a pause when beginning a new sentence within the current sentence.

apostrophes

Straight apostrophes (') are for contractions and elisions.  Examples: "don't", "nothin'".

Curly apostrophes (’) are used to indicate grammatical possession in English.  Example: "women’s clothing".

An exception is for apostrophes that are part of a proper noun as shown in the next example.  Business names and place names should always use straight quotes (with the exception of non-English characters such as the ʻokina in "Hawaiʻi").

Example: I am going to stop by McDonald’s farm [referring to a person with a curly apostrophe] on my way to the McDonald's restaurant [referring to a business name with a straight apostrophe].

This provides a semantic distinction between "McDonald’s" (something that belongs to a person, the possessive form of a proper noun) versus "McDonald's" (the name of a business or place, a nonpossessive proper noun).