Editorial Style Guide

General

• Use Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, Twelve Edition for definitions
• Use Canada’s Writing Tips Plus as a general reference
• Use Oxford Canadian Dictionary, Second Edition for spelling reference
• Avoid verbosity when it doesn’t affect the intended voice, tone or clarity of the text:
  • Do this: “To elaborate…”
  • Not this: “In order to further elaborate…”

Numbers

• Use Arabic numbers unless:
  • the sentence begins with the number
  • the number(s) is(are) part of an expression: “one of two…” or “back to square one”
  • the number is in the millions or more (e.g., “3 million people” instead of “3,000,000 people”)
  • it’s the name of a product, in which case, write the number the same way as the official name (e.g., “A7 III”)
• Use thousand separator
• Spell out ordinal numbers up to the ninth and use Arabic numerals with letters suffixes for the rest (e.g., “10th,” “11th,” “12th”).
  • However, stick to the latter for generation in the context of tech and abbreviate the word “generation”: “1st gen AirPods”

Punctuations

• Periods and commas always go inside quotation marks
• Forgo the comma between a conjunction word and an adverb, but put a comma after the adverb: “…and finally, …”
• An adverbial phrase that starts a sentence should always be followed by a comma: “In this building, there’s a cat.”
• Do not use serial comma unless the lack thereof introduces ambiguity
• Use em dash without spaces
• Use en dash:
  • to indicate a range: “May–July”
  • to join a prefix or suffix to a compound noun: “Nova Scotia–based”
• Use typographic quotation marks unless they are part of a code block
• Use the ellipsis character … rather than 3 periods

Capitalization

• Use down style capitalization

• Post titles should use title case:

  • Capitalize the first word
  • Capitalize words of 4 letters or more
  • Capitalize the first word after an em dash or a colon
  • Lowercase conjunctions (e.g., “and,” “as,” “but,” “for,” “if,” “nor,” “or,” “so,” “yet”)
  • Lowercase articles (e.g., “a,” “an,” “the”)
  • Lowercase short prepositions (e.g., “as,” “at,” “by,” “for”), except for ones that are part of a phrasal verb, like “set up” or “catch up”

• Heading levels 2 and below should use sentence case

Abbreviations

• Latin abbreviations should be separated by periods and followed by a comma when appropriate “e.g.,”
• “versus” should be abbreviated to just “vs”—no periods and no italics
• When abbreviating university names, retain the spaces: U of T for University of Toronto (not UofT)
• To create the plural form of abbreviated nouns in all caps, such as “DAW” and “CD,” add an “s” directly after it, without an apostrophe: “DAWs”
• To create the simple past form of abbreviated verbs in all caps, such as “DIY” or “GAS,” use an apostrophe: “DIY’ed,” “FOMO’ed”
  • However, for gerund or present participle, append “ing” with a hyphen: “DIY-ing”

Contractions

Contractions are preferred in prose: “I’d” for “I had” and “I would,” “don’t” for “do not” etc. However, it’s acceptable to forgo contractions if it’s appropriate for the context and/or tone:

• “Do not do this.”
• “It will not end well.”

However, do not use contraction for nouns: “This team is good” (not “This team’s good”).

Bullet lists

• Bullet lists with one-line items should have the same leading as body text
• Bullet lists with more than 1 item that’s longer than 1 line should have more leading for better visual separation, except when each item starts with highlighted text
• Items in a bullet list where the items are read as part of a sentence should start with lowercase
• If every single item in a bullet list is a complete sentence, punctuate and capitalize each as such. However, if the list has a mix of complete sentences and incomplete fragments of text, use sentence case for each item but forgo the punctuation at the end of the sentence
• If it’s a list of webpages or websites, follow their styling as much as possible. For example, if a webpage’s title is all in lowercase, write the title as such in the list

Italics

• Use italics rather than bold for emphasis
• Use italics for titles of a body or collection of work, such as blogs, books, movies, podcasts, magazines, websites etc. For works that are part of a larger collection, such as blog posts, articles, podcast episodes, TV show episodes etc., use quotation marks

Bold

• Use bold for warnings
• Use bold for key terms and jargon as appropriate

Singular vs plural

Collective nouns should be treated as singular when the noun itself is used, but if the collective noun is being referred to using a pronoun, treat it as plural for a more natural sounding sentence:

• “The university states that they will release a statement.”

Dates and times

• Use ISO8601 for dates in logs: YYYY-MM-DD
• In prose:
  • use Month [Arabic number] format for month and day: “July 1”
  • use lowercase with periods for “a.m.” and “p.m.,” preceding with a space for typefaces with oldstyle figures: “12 p.m.”
  • use uppercase with periods for “A.M” and “P.M.” preceding with a space for typefaces with lining figures to match the cap height

Units

• Always use primes to denote foot and inch, except when it’s part of a product name, in which case use ft and in: “16-in MachBook Pro”
• Do not put a space between the value and the unit:
  • 16GB (not 16 GB)
  • 140W (not 140 W)

Spelling

• Use Canadian spelling: “favourite,” “centre,” “colour” etc.

Misc

• Spell out “and” instead of using ampersand in headings
• Use the proper florin symbol ƒ—not an italicized “f”—without a slash when describing f-stop in camera equipment: ƒ1.8

A

• aka (not a.k.a.)

B

• Bear Blog (not BearBlog, bearblog or bear blog)

D

• double-check (not double check)

E

• email (not e-mail)
• enrolment (not enrollment)

F

• footer directive (not Footer Directive)

H

• high-end (adj.)
• high-quality (adj)

M

• Markdown (not MD or markdown)
• metalhead (not metal head)

N

• non-stop (not nonstop)

P

• proofread (not proof-read)

X

• X-ray (not X-Ray)