Fundamentals of Mechanics/Manual of Style

Welcome, fellow physicists! I hope you are interested in helping to contribute to the Fundamentals of Mechanics effort. If so, please be sure to follow the style guidelines as detailed below. I'd also like to set some basic ground rules on how to create or edit style guidelines: If no particular guideline has been set yet, consider whether setting a particular guideline improves the readability or accessibility of the book: If so, be bold and make a call! Please make sure any future guidelines align with previously set ones or carve out explicitly detailed exceptions. Be sure to document it here in an appropriate, logical place. If not, consider whether it would be helpful to document options or default decisions to help speed up content creation. If a particular guideline has been set already, and you think it needs to be changed, please use one of the following procedures: If you need to carve out a new exception that creates minimal change for extant content, use the procedure detailed above. If you need to change anything else, please start a new topic on the discussion page for this manual to allow for a period of debate and consensus-building. Source See the ../Preface/ for more information. Default Style Excepting any decisions detailed below or covered by the overarching Wikibooks Manual of Style, the following print manuals of style will apply in priority order (insofar as they can apply to digital text): American Institute of Physics (1990). AIP Style Manual (4th ed.). New York: American Institute of Physics Press. Primarily the following pages: pp. 12–19 (III. General style), pp. 23–25 (IV. Mathematical expressions: D. RECOMMENDED NOTATION), and pp. 35–40 (APPENDIX B: CORRECT OR PREFERRED SPELLINGS OF FREQUENTLY OCCURING WORDS and APPENDIX C: UNITS OF MEASURE) University of Chicago Press Editorial Staff (2024). The Chicago Manual of Style (18th ed.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. If anyone knows of a freely accessible version or edition of the CMoS, please link it here! You can use the corresponding abbreviations AIP and CMoS to refer to these works. Naming and Structure Each part of this book that contains subparts should, itself, only consist of a short introduction and a table of contents on its page. Use the following heading conventions to help folks better know where they are in the book: The main page of the book uses the heading == Contents ==. Each chapter page of the book uses the heading == Chapter Contents ==. The page for each section that consists of 2 or more subsections uses the heading == Section Contents ==. (No section should consist of only one subsection; instead include that content on the section page directly.) This book is divided into chapters, sections, and subsections as organized in the original text, with any deviations noted below. All chapters consist only of sections. With one exception (for now): Chapter 0 - Preface Each section consists only of a single page of content or consists only of two or more subsections (with an optional short intro paragraph). All subsections consist only of a single page of content. Intentional deviations from source naming and structure: Remove any parenthetical parts of chapter, section, and subsection titles: E.g., Kinetic Energy and the Work–Energy Theorem instead of Kinetic Energy (KE) and the Work‐Energy Theorem The first section of each chapter should have the title Introduction regardless of what title is used in the source. Remove any leading article from the title of a section or subsection, except for named theorems and laws: E.g., Center of Gravity instead of The Center of Gravity but The Parallel-Axis Theorem Style and Grammar Non-Technical Style Tables All column/row headers in a table should be in title case, regardless of how they appear in the source: E.g., Unit Name instead of Unit name All other words and phrases in a table should usually not be capitalized, unless it is capitalized in general use: E.g., kelvin instead of Kelvin as the unit, but use standard name capitalization: William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin Technical Style Numbers and Units Numbers and units should be displayed using the following conventions (which largely follow AIP): In most cases, numeric values, whether in scientific notation or not, and whether accompanied by units or not, should use the Val template. This template handles the following requirements elegantly, but you can use some or all of these other methods as needed: Negative values should use the HTML element − (−) instead of any other symbol: -2 Numbers in scientific notation should use the HTML element × (×): 3.0 4 Certain sequences of information within a sentence or phrase should not break between lines, which can be accomplished thru various means, though use of the Val or Nowrap template is preferred: Number/unit pairs should not break, though it's OK for a unit made up of multiple words to break within itself: {{Nowrap|18 kg}} but {{Nowrap|5 boxes}} of hay Numbers in scientific notation should not break: {{Nowrap|3.0 × 10^−4 m}} Exceptions to AIP style include: Use the HTML element µ without italics (µ) for the SI prefix "micro-", not μ (μ)