Style Guide

Usage and grammar

These guidelines serve as a baseline for all our work, but in particular for Faculty communications, including this website and our newsletter.

• Acronyms : Try not to use them. If you must, provide a definition when you first use one.
• Contractions : Use them whenever they won’t sacrifice clarity. They generally make copy sound more conversational.
• Em Dashes : If you use them, format them—like this—with no spaces on either side.
• En Dashes : Use to denote a range, such as October 7–9.
• Jargon : Speak plainly and avoid jargon as much as possible.
• Numbers : Spell out numbers one through ten. Write higher numbers as digits. For example: Use 13, not thirteen.
• Oxford or serial comma : Use it here, here, and here.
• Their : Use it as a gender-neutral possessive pronoun.
• They : Use it as a gender-neutral pronoun to refer to multiple people or just one. For example, “They rode their bike to lunch.” and “They rode their bikes to lunch.” are both correct. (It’s also good to use words like folks or y’all to address groups of people instead of using the gender-specific guys.)
• Your (not my) is the possessive pronoun we use to describe features or items that belong to a user.

Website guidelines

These guidelines apply specifically to websites.

• Use sentence case for all headers and button copy.
• Use ampersands in headings when space is tight. Otherwise, just use the word and.
• Use title case only for titles (e.g., the title of a blog post or newsletter).
• Don’t use terminal punctuation in headers or titles, unless you need a question mark or exclamation point. And if the latter, you probably don’t.
• Don’t link terminal punctuation.
• Ensure linked text describes the result of clicking the link. Ideally, linked text meant to prompt action appears at the end of a sentence, so the reader can take action as soon as they understand the task.

Word list

Adapted and extended from the O’Reilly Style Guide , our favorite reference for many years.