Personal style guide for ninoan.com

2 February 2025

Modified: 30 July 2026

375 words

• Headings in blog posts start at h2, since the post title is h1. So, in Markdown, the first level of headings in a blog post is marked with ##.
• Use British English spelling (e.g., “organisation”, “realise”, etc.).
  • Exception: I write “math” instead of “maths”, because I still speak with an ~American accent.
  • Exception: for the same reason, I write “gotten”, not “got”, as the past participle of “get”. E.g., “how far you’ve gotten”.
  • Don’t capitalise “God”, “He”, “Him”, “His”. It’s the twenty-first century, god can deal with his name just being a noun.
• Punctuation only goes inside quotation marks if it belongs there semantically.
  • E.g.: I don’t know if this sign says “hello”. Does this sign say “hello”? Maybe the sign says “Hello.”.
• Parenthetical clauses can be delimited by parentheses (obviously), or en-dashes with a space on either side – like this. (In Markdown, en-dashes can be spelled as two hyphens.)
• Use double-quotes for the first level of quotation, then alternate between single and double. E.g., “‘Curiouser and curiouser,’ said Alice.”
• Use curly quotes & apostrophes. In Markdown, you can use straight quotes & apostrophes, since Astro will convert them. Exception: Words that start with an apostrophe need to have the apostrophe spelled out as a right single quote, or they will be turned into an opening single quote. E.g.: “Oi mate, when I tell you to ’op on, you ’op on!”
• Don’t be overly pretentious. Say “use”, not “utilise”. (You can use “utilise” to mean “make full use of”, if you really have to.)
• Say “all right”, not “alright”. Because I saw someone on the internet say “all right” is better, so that’s what we’re doing.
• Don’t add a stupid ‘s’ to words that don’t need it. No “whilst”, no “towards”, etc.
• Possessives end with “‘s” if the subject is in the singular, even if the subject’s name ends with an “s”. E.g., “Jess’s bag”, not “Jess’ bag”.
• When referring to the plural of an identifier in a programming language, an “s” goes outside of the backticks, and the spelling of the identifier is preserved. So, “Arrays”, “Propertys”. This looks weird, but writing “Properties” or “Properties” both seems bad.