Invaluable for the Christian writer

This book is invaluable to someone like myself who does a lot of Christian writing. I have referred to it often when writing articles for my Web site and newsletter and when working on my books and even on my Analytical-Literal Translation of the New Testament. It provides an overview of proper punctuation, capitalization, special formatting like italics and small caps, and abbreviations.

Most any English grammars would provide such information. But what makes this book special is it focuses on the special needs of Christian writers. So the list of abbreviations, for instance, includes the proper abbreviations for all 66 canonical books, along with for the apocryphal and pseudepigrapha books. It also provides lists of proper capitalization, like if “apocryphal” and “pseudepigrapha” in my previous sentence should be capitalized (they shouldn’t).

It also shows that when quoting a Scripture verse and giving the verse reference at the end of the sentence, the period should come after the parentheses, e.g., “And he called His name Jesus” (Matthew 1:25). This book also told me that I did not need to use an ellipse in this Scripture quote. Even though I only quoted a part of the verse, what I quoted was a complete sentence.

You can see that I even referred to this book in writing this review. So I highly recommend it.