From Peter Rowland
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(20 June) recommends David Yost’s suggestion of making chemical
names like amidophosphoribosyltransferase easier to read by introducing
capitals—AmidoPhosphoRibosylTransferase. This is not much of an
improvement and there is an easier way: treat groups like “amido” as words and
separate them with spaces, such as amido phospho ribosyl transferase.
Spaces are more easily picked out by the eye than capitals. They also obviate
the need to use the shift key, a minor but real irritant as the extensive use of
lower case on the Web indicates. And unlike capitals, they are universal in that
they don’t vary in different typefaces.
If you really want to ice the cake, do both and perhaps even double the
spaces. It is unlikely that a reader coming across a compound name like this
would fail to realise that it was that of a chemical, but in cases where there
might be doubt—periodic acid, for example—it would be useful to put
it into square brackets: [periodic acid] or, better still, [per iodic acid].
The idea of making it a convention to treat chemical names as sentences made
up of separable words has the further advantage of bringing chemistry closer to
everyday language—surely no bad thing. Any hope that New
Scientist might lead the way in this?
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