Halopedia:Grammar guide

This Grammar Guide outlines the grammatical style used by Halopedia all its articles, categories and templates. It must be followed whenever contributing to the wiki. Although it is not enforced, it is also recommended that you also follow this guideline in social areas such as talk pages, message walls, the forums and the Discord.

Additionally, this guide highlights common grammatical errors made by editors to Halopedia, in the hopes of preventing them from occuring again in future.

Language
Halopedia exclusively uses English everywhere on the site and on its Discord. Unless directly quoting from a piece of Halo media, languages other than English should never be used on the wiki; Halopedia is a strictly English wiki, and other wikis such as Halopedia Español (Spanish Halopedia) exist to document the Halo franchise in other languages.

Spelling
For the wiki itself, American English spellings should be used. Please use a spell checker while editing to ensure that you don't make any spelling errors, which someone else would then be forced to correct. Furthermore, if you're unsure of the spelling of a particular word, please look it up before submitting your edit!

General rules
Generally, Halopedia follows the standard grammatical rules of American English. As a rule of thumb, if this page doesn't specify a particular Halopedia convention for a certain situation, then the usual grammatical rule applies.

Capital letter usage
The standard rules about capital letter usage apply on Halopedia. However, Halopedia also uses capital letters in some other contexts. As usual, titles (such as military ranks) and names of people, places and events should all be written with the first letter in capitals. However, Halopedia also chooses to capitalize the first letter in the names of video games, levels and maps, game modes, species, weapons, vehicles and languages. Finally, some words are written in all capitals, to mirror how they are written in pieces of Halo media. These include (but aren't limited to) MJOLNIR, SPARTAN, codenames (e.g. Codename: COALMINER) and operation names (e.g. Operation: JOVIAN WHISTLE).

Here are some examples:

Abbreviations
If an uncommon abbreviation is to be used in an article, it must first be specified in that article what the abbreviation is short for. This is to ensure that readers can understand the text without having to look up the meaning of an abbreviation. Here is an example:

Acronyms
An acronym is an abbreviation of a multi-word name or phrase, which takes only the first letter from each word. For example, UN is an acronym for United Nations. Most pieces of Halo media do not write acronyms with full stops separating each of the letters. In keeping with this, nor does Halopedia:

Apostrophes
Apostrophes are only necessary in two situations: to denote ownership, or to signify a contraction. They should only be used in these cirumstances, and none others. They are not necessary in plurals (even plurals of acronyms).

Possessives of plurals
When taking the possessive form of a plural (or, in fact, any letter ending in "s"), it is not necessary to append an additional "s" to the word. For example:

"it's" versus "its"
This mistake is prevelant with new users to the wiki. The word "its" is the possessive form of the pronoun "it". Meanwhile, "it's" is a contraction of "it is". This can be confusing, as normally possessives are made by appending " 's" to the end of a noun, so a good way to remember is to compare it with the other pronouns' possessive forms; you wouldn't say "your's", "hi's", "her's", "our's" or "their's", so nor should you say "it's" as a possessive.

For example:

Placing emphasis
Often, new users write text underlined, in capitals or in bold to denote emphasis. This is not accepted on Halopedia. Instead, any text upon which emphasis is placed should be written in italics, as follows: