Specialized Scientific Notation

The exclamation point is used as a factorial symbol in mathematical notation:

n!

5! [represents 5 × 4 × 3 × 2 × 1]

The exclamation point is also used as a phonetic symbol (for emphasis) in linguistic representations:

Some interesting counterexamples appear in !Kung syntax.

3.8 Apostrophes

Apostrophes are used to form the possessive case of nouns and indefinite pronouns, and contractions. Optionally, apostrophes may also be used in the plurals of abbreviations and numbers:

Einstein's theory, bacterium's [The plural is bacteria], anyone's, children's [The singular is child], moss's composition, Yeats's letters, supervisors' schedules

apostrophe	of phrase
Checking a product’s quality characteristics is called inspection.	Checking the quality characteristics of a product is called inspection.
Technical sales involve the selling of machine technology to meet customers' specific needs.	Technical sales involve the selling of machine technology to meet the specific needs of customers.

You use it when referring to other scientists' work. When referring to two or more people together, the apostrophe goes after the last name. When you refer to a famous or generally accepted discovery, the apostrophe is not needed:

other scientists	Zarka’s method To coincide with Ponte Castaneda’s lower bound for the strain potential … In this paper, Cauchy’s and Novozhilov’s measures of mean rotation are compared
2 scientists together	Iwan and Moeller’s (1976) work appears to be the first publication on this subject.
famous discovery	the Curie point, the Doppler effect

The apostrophe can also be used to form plurals of numbers, abbreviations, and symbols, though it can also be left out:

the early 1990's (OR: the early 1990s); first add up all the X's (OR: first add up all the Xs).

Optionally, the apostrophe is used to form the plurals of acronyms and numbers. Be consistent, however, throughout a document. The apostrophe is always used to form the plurals of lowercase letters:

R.E.M’s or REM’s or REMs

386's or 386s

x's

The apostrophe is used to form standard contractions of certain words:

it + is = it's

we + will = we'll

3.9 Quotation Marks

Unless the documentation style you are following specifies otherwise, quotation marks are used:

a) to enclose the names of articles, short reports, and other brief documents cited in your document:

The source of the design information is the 1982 article "Boundary Layer Development on Turbine Airfoil Suction Surfaces," which appeared in the Journal of Engineering for Power.

b) to indicate direct quotations of speech or excerpts from other documents:

As Vorhees has stated, "Simple adjustment of the control-gate voltages, V_a and V_b, enables us to realize any phase between 0 and [p] relative to the state phase, q."

Periods and commas are placed inside quotation marks; semicolons and colons, outside. Question marks (?) and exclamation marks (!) go inside the quotation marks if they are part of the material quoted and outside the quotation marks if they are not:

Lightman begins his survey of the development of cosmological theories by posing questions such as "Has the universe existed forever?"

What did Oppenheimer mean when, after the first atomic explosion, he said, "We thought of the legend of Prometheus"?

For a quotation within a quotation, single quotation marks are used unless the main quotation is in block form; if the main quotation is in block form, double quotation marks are used for the quotation within it: