Editorial Style Guide

Numbers

• Use Arabic numbers unless:
  • the sentence begins with the number
  • the number(s) is(are) part of an expression: “one of two…” or
• Use thousand separator

Punctuations

• Periods and commas always go inside quotation marks
• 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

• Post titles should use title case
• Headings 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)

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.”

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

Bullet lists

• Bullet list with short items (a few words max) should have the same leading as body text
• Bullet list with long items should have more leading for better visual separation
• Items in a bullet list where the items are read as part of a sentence should start with lowercase

Emphasis

• Use italics rather than bold for emphasis

Title of works

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

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: “12 P.M.”

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”

Spelling

• Use Canadian spelling: “favourite,” “centre,” “colour” etc.
• Email (not e-mail)
• Bear Blog (not BearBlog)

Last updated 3 hours, 2 minutes ago