What formatting recommendations do you have for posts?

Question

Bob Jones has noted that I edit a lot of posts and has asked me to post my style guide so I can be saved some work. Now, I don't mind editing, but that seems like a reasonable idea.

I'm not the only one who edits posts or posts well-formatted questions or answers on the site, though; what aesthetic recommendations do you have for posts? What are frequent formatting errors or typos, etc, do you see? What do you want people to know about formatting and cleaning up their own posts?

Answer 1

Quotations

• Use > to begin a blockquote:

  > This is the beginning of a quotation.
  ^ It starts with the > symbol.

• Avoid using the code block style:

      This is the first line of code.
  ^^^^Note that it starts with four (4) spaces.
  

• Sometimes you want to override the automatic word wrap. You can do that by:

  Starting a

  New paragraph

  or:

  Putting two spaces at the end of a line.
  (Two spaces over here:------------------>^^)

  (This tip applies everywhere, but is most helpful in the context of quoting things.)

• Poetry is hard to get formatted correctly since Markdown "eats" extra spaces. Your best bet is to use that code block:

  This is a bit of text that gets quoted before the start of:

  This poem is embedded in the blockquote,
     In a new paragraph with four leading spaces.
  

  You might also try   (non-breaking space):

  This poem is embedded in the blockquote,
    With two leading  .

Answer 2

This is an ad-hoc list. Much more could be said and I wish that less needed to be said (spelling and grammar...).

Content

• Pay attention to spelling, grammar, capitalization and punctuation! A browser with a spell-checker helps (yeah Firefox!).
• If you leave the verse numbers in a verse, superscript them with HTML tags (<sup>...</sup>).
• Hide raw links, i.e.:
  • This: ...is an example of the literary device anadiplosis...
  • or even this: ...is an example of the literary device anadiplosis (see the Wikipedia article)...
  • but certainly not this: ...is an example of the literary device anadiplosis (see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anadiplosis)...
• Think about citing Bible versions. I try to cite the translation unless
  1. I have altered it ("the LORD" -> "Yahweh," etc)
  2. I did it myself (though I sometimes note that).
• For long posts, it is helpful to the reader if you break up your thought into chunks by using titles.
• This is slightly outside the scope of the question, but tag appropriately.

Nit-Picky

• Don't use regular hyphen when you ought to use a dash, if you can help it:

  • As punctuation in the middle of a sentence—like this—use em-dashes.
    (—, Unicode hex 2014/decimal 8211, HTML code —)
  • For designating number ranges (90–99% of the time on this site, it's used for verse numbers) use en-dashes.
    (–, Unicode hex 2013/decimal 8210, HTML code –)

• Unless you have a reason not to, spell out Bible book names rather than abbreviating, especially in the middle of a sentence. If you must abbreviated, use at least three or four letters.

Try to look at your post with a typesetter's eye. You want it to be attractive in a readable way (thankfully the site does not allow arbitrary coloring/fonts/sizes...).

Answer 3

Fonts

For better or worse, there aren't too many choices when it comes to special fonts:

• Use italic style for transliterated words or for short phrases you wish to emphasize. Don't go crazy with long sentences or you will wear out your readers eyes/patience!

• Use boldface to really emphasize something. It works best when you want to draw your reader's attention to a particular point.

• Avoid bold italic unless you have a really good reason.

• Don't worry about using Hebrew or Greek fonts unless you are already pretty comfortable with it already. Transliterations work just fine. I sometimes copy-n-paste from other sites if they are handy, but generally I don't bother.

Answer 4

Sections, divisions and headings

Long answers tend to suffer from the wall-of-text problem. One solution is to write shorter answers, but that's not how we like things here on this site. A better solution is to divide your answer into sections. It's very common to include a Abstract, Summary, or Conclusion (but not TL;DR, please). These can be formatted as a heading by underlining with dashes (-):

Heading
-------

Or double-underlining with equal signs (=):

Heading (Bigger)
================

Lesser (or unnamed) divisions can be marked out with a horizontal rule:

----------

Another way to break up a block of text is to use lists, quotations, and (minimal) bold text. But if you are shifting from one discrete topic to another, it's best to use the sectioning tools.