Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
List items should be formatted consistently in a list. Unless there is a good reason to use different list types in the same page, consistency throughout an article is also desirable. Use sentence case by default for list items, whether they are complete sentences or not. Sentence case is used for around 99% of lists on Wikipedia.
Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven (John Milton, in Paradise Lost) [8] Be yourself; Better the Devil you know (than the Devil you do not) Better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all; Better to light one candle than to curse the darkness; Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt ...
Similarly, if the page is a list, do not introduce the list as "This is a list of X" or "This list of Xs ...". A clearer and more informative introduction to the list is better than verbatim repetition of the title. A good example of this is the List of Benet Academy alumni. (See also Format of the first sentence below.)
This does not mean using fewer words is always better; rather, when considering equivalent expressions, choose the more concise. Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts.
after comparatives, phrases or clauses with than: better than you, smaller than I had imagined. An adjective phrase may include both modifiers before the adjective and a complement after it, as in very difficult to put away. Adjective phrases containing complements after the adjective cannot normally be used as attributive adjectives before a noun.
Constituents are successively broken down into their parts as one moves down a list of phrase structure rules for a given sentence. This top-down view of sentence structure stands in contrast to much work done in modern theoretical syntax. In Minimalism [3] for instance, sentence structure is generated from the bottom up.
The advice in this guideline is not limited to the examples provided and should not be applied rigidly. If a word can be replaced by one with less potential for misunderstanding, it should be. [1] Some words have specific technical meanings in some contexts and are acceptable in those contexts, e.g. claim in law.
The notion of "lexical class" is somewhat more precise, and at the same time, a bit blurrier, because lexical classes are defined by the syntactic role of and syntactic relationship between words and phrases, rather than by the "dictionary definition" of what part of speech a given word belongs to. It also better accounts for abstract nouns and ...