Season’s greetings, scribes, wordsmiths, and logophiles*!

Sing along, now: “Oh, the weather outside is frightful, but nothing could be more delightful . . . than December’s University of Oregon Editorial Style Guide quick tips, which helps ensure your communications follow UO editorial style . . . 

“So let it flow, let it flow, let it flow!”

first annual

Some object to this—can something be a first-ever and also an annual? What if it isn’t held again?

Some college websites say first annual is acceptable, simply meaning “the first of what is planned to be an annual series of events.” But our guide, the Chicago Manual of Style, argues it’s nonsensical to use first annual to describe an event before the second annual one has taken place.

In most cases, inaugural should solve the problem. According to Merriam-Webster, the word marks the “first in a projected series.”

Question: Are you an early-career faculty member? Or an early career faculty member?

Answer: You’re an early-career faculty member. With the hyphen.

Chicago notes that compounds formed by an adverb ending in ly plus an adjective or participle—such as largely irrelevant or smartly dressed—don’t get hyphenated before or after a noun, since ambiguity is virtually impossible.

First, note that in this context career is neither an adjective nor a participle—it’s a noun. But more to the point is the question of ambiguity: without the hyphen, this could conceivably be read as an early “career faculty member”—that is, a career faculty member who is early, i.e., maybe they showed up well ahead of time.

Run-on quotations in new paragraphs

One more—turn your attention back to the intro and the second graph: “So let it flow, let it flow, let it flow!”

Note that when a quoted passage is run into surrounding text and then begins a new paragraph, a quotation mark is needed at the beginning of the quotation and at the beginning of each new paragraph—but at the end of only the final paragraph.

Got questions, comments, or editorial-style stumpers? Send ’em to editor Matt Cooper, University Communications.