Style guide

no accent

Prominent figures can just be named in stories, with their function at second mention: "Alistair Darling said last night ... " (first mention); "the chancellor added ... " (subsequent mentions)

Where it is thought necessary to explain who someone is, write "Bryan Robson, the Sheffield United manager, said" or "the Sheffield United manager, Bryan Robson, said".

In such cases the commas around the name indicate there is only one person in the position, so write "the Tory leader, David Cameron, said" (only one person in the job), but "the former Tory leader Michael Howard said" (there have been many).

Do not leave out the definite article in such constructions as "style guru David Marsh said ... " It should be "The style guru David Marsh" (if there are other style gurus) or "David Marsh, the style guru, ... " (if you feel only one person merits such a description)

National Aeronautics and Space Administration, but no need to spell out

Do not use when you mean country or state: reserve nation to describe people united by language, culture and history so as to form a distinct group within a larger territory. And beware of attributing the actions of a government or a military force to a national population ("The Israelis have killed 400 children during the intifada"). Official actions always have opponents within a population; if we don't acknowledge this, we oversimplify the situation and shortchange the opponents

the former Public Record Office, now merged with the Historical Manuscripts Commission

(NASUWT) call it "the union" after first mention if you want to avoid using these unlovely initials; note that an "and" seems to be missing somewhere

Nesta after first mention

transmits electricity and gas

but NHS or health service are normally sufficient

horseracing

Nice after first mention

(Northern Ireland)

formed in 2004 from a merger between the prison and probation services, it moved from the Home Office to the Ministry of Justice in 2007; Noms after first mention (but note that in the US, Noms stands for national outcomes measurement system)

lc, eg Peak District national park, Yellowstone national park

may be abbreviated to NS&I

peacetime conscription in the UK lasted from 1949 until 1960

Geronimo was a Native American (not an American Indian or Red Indian); George Bush is a native American

North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, but no need to spell out

nothing; nought the figure 0

former Vatican spokesman

but Royal Navy

but nazism

scientific name and style is Homo neanderthalensis

one word, whether adjective or adverb: the pub nearby; the nearby pub

an agent of retribution and vengeance, not a synonym for "enemy"

Even if you have always wanted to appear in Private Eye, resist the temptation to write such nonsense as "grey is the new black", "billiards is the new snooker", "Barnsley is the new Tuscany", etc

not Holland, which is only part of the country; use Dutch as the adjective. Exception: the Dutch football team is generally known as Holland

often redundant, as in "a new report said yesterday"

hyphens

no hyphens

capped up, whether you are talking about Franklin D Roosevelt's job creation policies in the 1930s or Gordon Brown's more recent version

but old Labour

the Guardian, the Observer, the New York Times, etc, do not write "the Sun newspaper", etc: patronising and unnecessary

lc; but New Year's Day, New Year's Eve

but New York state

national health service, but not necessary to spell out; health service is also OK

National Infection Control and Health Protection Agency

(1844-1900) German philosopher; occasionally misspelt, even in the Guardian

surnames do not exist in the north of Nigeria: a typical name would be Isa Sani Sokoto (Isa the son of Sani who comes from the town of Sokoto); so best to write in full

but night-time

it stands for "not in my back yard"

veil that covers the face apart from the eyes

cars

hut

in the charts, the world tennis No 1, etc

(Downing Street)

plural noes

Nobel peace prize, Nobel prize for literature, etc

means something along the lines of "this is so obvious, you don't need a brain to know it" not "only someone with no brain would think this"

not No campaign, "no" campaign or any of the other variants

no hyphens

It is a (very persistent) myth that "none" has to take a singular verb: plural is acceptable and often sounds more natural, eg "none of the current squad are good enough to play in the Premiership", "none of the issues have been resolved"

not no-one

Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland and Iceland

north London, north Wales, north-west England, the north-west, etc

Tyneside (Newcastle), Wearside (Sunderland), Teesside (Middlesbrough); we often confuse these or get them wrong in some way that makes it look as if the farthest north-east we have ventured is Stoke Newington

also known as aurora borealis; the southern hemisphere counterpart is aurora australis

avoid this expression: we work on national newspapers

Pakistan

national park; but North Yorkshire Moors railway

not nosey

useful for emphasis, but is now used far too often

retail arm of RWE npower; nothing to do with nuclear power

Spell out from one to nine; numerals from 10 to 999,999; thereafter use m or bn for sums of money, quantities or inanimate objects in copy, eg £10m, 5bn tonnes of coal, 30m doses of vaccine; but million or billion for people or animals, eg 1 million people, 3 billion rabbits, etc; spell trillion in full at first mention, then tn; in headlines use m, bn or tn

Numbers have always contained power, and many a journalist will tremble at the very sight of them. But most often the only maths we need to make sense of them is simple arithmetic. Far more important are our critical faculties, all too often switched off at the first sniff of a figure.

It's easy to be hoodwinked by big numbers in particular. But are they really so big? Compared with what? And what is being assumed? A government announcement of an extra £X million a year will look far less impressive if divided by 60 million (the British population) and/or 52 (weeks in the year). That's quite apart from the fact that it was probably trumpeted last week already, as part of another, bigger number. We have to be aggressive when interpreting the spin thrown at us.

The legal profession has, in the same way, been forced to put DNA evidence in the dock. If the probability of the accused and the culprit sharing the same genetic profile is one in 3 million, then there are 19 other people in Britain alone who share the same DNA "match".

Never invent a big figure when a small one will do. Totting jail sentences together ("the six men were jailed for a total of 87 years") is meaningless as well as irritating. Similarly, saying that something has an area the size of 150 football pitches, or is "eight times the size of Wales", is cliched and may not be helpful.

Here is an easy three-point guide to sidestepping common "mythematics" traps:
1 Be careful in conversions, don't muddle metric and imperial, or linear, square and cubic measures. Square miles and miles square are constantly confused: an area 10 miles square is 10 miles by 10 miles, which equals 100 square miles.
2 Be extremely wary of (or don't bother) converting changes in temperature; you run the risk of confusing absolute and relative temperatures, eg while a temperature of 2C is about the same as 36F, a temperature change of 2C corresponds to a change of about 4F.
3 When calculating percentages, beware the "rose by/fell by X%" construction: an increase from 3% to 5% is a 2 percentage point increase or a 2-point increase, not a 2% increase