Consistency

Use consistent spelling throughout. Realize that English spelling is different from American. The majority of English journals will use American spelling (“center” and not “centre”, “defense” and not “defence”, “polarize” and not “polarise”). Distributing concepts of texts with spelling errors means that you wish to abuse your coauthors as spell checkers. Or even worse: you really wish to make an editor and/or reviewer angry.

Hyphens

Be consistent with hyphens. Many non-English languages (like Dutch and German) differ considerably from American-English with respect to the use of hyphens. A good (American) rule of thumb is: never concatenate two nouns, never use a hyphen (or dash if you wish) unless it is an adjective. Example: “the Green function” (or “the Green’s” function) and “the Green-function method”. Realize that even among native English speakers the use of hyphens is a matter of debate.

Quotation marks

Always use only one sort of quotation marks for quotations.

Full capital abbreviations

Get around as much as possible to defining full capital abbreviations (like RPA, SPP, FWHM, etc.). They distract and make the text less transparent.

Repeat their meaning regularly in long texts.

Conventional abbreviations

A number of terms will occur over and over again. In physics texts examples are: “Figure” and “Equation”. In many journals they are abbreviated to “Fig.”, “fig.”, “Eq.” or “eq.”. Check with a recent issue what the style of your target journal is. It will be received as sloppy by the editor – and possibly the referee – if the standard abbreviations you use, are incompatible with the practice of the journal.

Non-alphabetic characters

Usage of non-alphabetic characters like “&” and “@” in text is an indication of a high nerd value of the author. Just use “and” instead of “&” and “at” instead of “@”.