Very Basic Style Guide (version 2). Updates will be issued.
The main house style is direct and conversational, aimed at a mainly educated and informed readership. Informal vocabulary – “kids”, “info” – is welcomed, though office-speak – “going forward”, “stakeholders”, etc., is not. Be succinct and lively.
Punctuation, including colons and semicolons (now discouraged in some newspapers), is encouraged. Use it to make the sense clearer.
Apply the following to house copy and to quoted copy, though never in a way which alters the meaning of copy from other outlets.
We write ‘Covid’ and ‘COVID-19’ but no other variant, so not COVID or Covid-19. Use SARS-CoV-2.
Write Government (capital G) not government when referring to the specific Government of a country or state. For generic references to government, use a lower case g.
Epidemic when referring to a viral outbreak in one country, pandemic when referring to the global outbreak.
Figures: spell out numbers up to nine. Use figures for 10 and above. 12 million, not 12million or 12m, 12 billion, not 12bn. And when writing large numbers, separate out the units of 1,000 with a comma, like that, not like this 1000. But spell out numbers of 10 and above if they’re at the beginning of a sentence.
Use %, not per cent, unless it’s at the beginning of a sentence, in which case use ‘per cent’.
Use – (option, dash) rather than – (dash).
Dates: use full out months, September 22nd, October 21st. Not September 22, not 22 September. Don’t abbreviate months, so not Sept.
Ages: use this format, 49 year-old rather than 49-year-old.
Ellipsis: use this… format rather than this … format. Unless it’s an ellipsis after a sentence has ended in which case use this. …
Initials: use initials and put a fullstops after them. So not Jeffrey Tucker but Jeffrey A. Tucker.
For the UK and the US, use ‘U.K.’ and ‘U.S.’. At the end of a sentence in which the last words are U.K. or U.S. don’t add another full stop.
Put a full stop after Dr. or Mr.
Titles of publications: italicise, but don’t italicise or capitalise the “the”, e.g. the Telegraph, the Mail, Bloomberg, UnHerd, the Financial Times (can be the FT at second mention). Make sure to source Mail stories properly. So they’re either from the Daily Mail, the Mail on Sunday or MailOnline. It usually says which of the various Mail titles are being used in header of the piece on the paper’s site.
Use curly inverted and double inverted commas, not straight. This also goes for the excerpts that appear on our socials. To get a curly forward facing single inverted comma use option+]; for a curly backward facing single inverted comma use option+shift+]; for curly forward facing double inverted commas use option+[; for curly backward facing double inverted commas use option+shift+[.
If using inverted commas for emphasis or to indicate a particular word or phrase, use single. If quoting direct speech, use double. Sometimes it’s in a grey area and you have to make a judgement call.
As a general rule, try and link to newspaper and magazine stories that aren’t behind paywalls – so the Mail, the Sun and the Guardian, rather than the Times or the Telegraph. Although that’s not a hard and fast rule.
e.g. shouldn’t have a comma after it, but i.e., should. etc should have a full stop after it and a comma before it.
Book titles: italicise.
Film Titles: italicise.
TV show tiles: italicise (but don’t italicise the names of TV channels like the BBC or GB News).
Song titles: ‘In Single Inverted Commas and Big Words Capitalised’. Full stops after close inverted commas.
Article titles, including academics papers, in single inverted commas. (That’s a rule change. We used to use double.)
People: very well known figures may simply be called e.g. Boris. Dominic Cummings may be called Dom at second mention. But don’t change that in quoted text.
Job Titles: Capitalise job titles, so not Sunetra Gupta, professor of theoretical epidemiology, but Sunetra Gupta, Professor of Theoretical Epidemiology. Ditto, Lee Cain, Chief of Staff (or ex-Chief of Staff). But if you’re just referring them to as a generic professor, use a lower case ‘p’, as in, “Sunetra Gupta is an Oxford professor.”
Names well known to our readers, such as Matt Hancock, Steve Baker, etc. (which should be written like that with a fullstop after the “c”) need not be followed by a job description. However, less well-known figures take a description after their names: Sarah Knapton, the Telegraph’s Science Editor.
Academic titles relevant to the debate: use Professor Melinda Mills at first mention. Prof Mills can be used at second mention. Dr. Clare Craig, then Dr. Craig. But familiar friends of the site may become Clare in house copy at second mention.
Where an author of a piece is being introduced, an academic title may be used followed by qualifications to show their area and level of knowledge. Dr Clare Craig, FRCPath.
For those without relevant jobs or titles, use full names at first mention. The Christian name or surname may be used at second mention. Mr., Mrs., etc. are never used.
Initialisation and acronyms: very familiar initialisations and acronyms – SAGE, ONS, DNA – need no explanation. Those less familiar are given in full at first mention with the acronym in brackets afterwards – the Covid Recovery Group (CRG) – and then CRG at second mention.
Phrases in other languages: italicise – et al. Only translate if likely to be unfamiliar to a reasonably educated audience.
Trademarks: capitalise, e.g. Google, Apple, Microsoft. And if they’ve got a capital letter in the middle of the trademark – UnHerd – use it.
Hyphens: A level as a noun, but hyphenate when adjectival, A-level results.
But both anti-vaxx movement and anti-vaxxers. Watch for that tricky spelling.
English spellings throughout, not American spellings, so people of colour, not people of color. If quoting from a chunk of American text, change to English spelling. Ditto English v American syntax, so fullstops and commas generally occurs outside quotations, unless the passage being quoted is being quoted in full and starts with a capital letter, in which case it should be preceded by a comma or a colon. If you’re just quoting from a bit of what someone has said, mid-sentence, put the fullstops outside the double inverted commas, not inside.
If you’re quoting inside a quote bracketed by double inverted commas use single inverted commas, never double.
Round-up style. Bullet point list. “Headline of piece in quotation marks with hyperlink, cut any excess from link (e.g. source info), don’t include the quotation marks in the hyperlink” – option-dash, then short description of piece, mention the outlet and for opinion pieces the writer, no full stop at the end. The headline should confirm with house style, so if ‘Covid-19’ is referred to in the headline cap it up to COVID-19.
Headings: Capitalise Each Word Except Minor Words (of, and, etc.)
Landscape images only, centred and made the same size.
Use Stop Press: (emboldened like that) to add links to related stories.
Use “Heading” for headlines, but sub-heads should just be in the standard “Paragraph” style, but in bold. Only the first letter of a sub-head should be capitalised.
Pictures
Don’t worry about copyright – just drag pictures off newspaper stories on to your desktop then drag them on to the page you’re creating. Or Google the image you’re after and do likewise. Ditto cartoons. Where the picture has a credit, reproduce that credit in in the photo caption. If the cartoon is by a cartoonist you know, say who it’s by and where it appeared, e.g. “Bob’s cartoon in today’s Telegraph.” But if you’re using a cartoon as the main photo, or a photo, you won’t be able to add a caption.
Sometimes you can put funny captions under the pictures, sometimes not. Play it by ear. If it’s not clear who is in the photo or what it refers to – if it’s a graph, for instance, embedded in the text – caption it, explaining what’s in it.
YouTube Videos and Tweets
When you first publish a daily update, use screen grabs of tweets and YouTube videos; don’t try and embed them in the page. Then send to the email newsletter subscribers. Then, once it’s been sent to them, go back into the page and replace the screen grabs with embedded tweets and YouTube videos. Reason is, embedded tweets and YouTube videos don’t show up properly in emails.
Most Common Mistakes
- Not checking to make sure text quoted from other sources conforms with the house style.
- Not putting a comma after i.e. (although there shouldn’t be a comma after e.g.).
- Using dashes – instead of en dashes –.
- Using single inverted commas for quoted speech, not double inverted commas.
- Putting double inverted commas inside double inverted commas (should be single if inside). This most often happens when putting double inverted commas around a headline in the round-up, with the headline using double to quote something.
- Using straight single and double inverted commas instead of curly.
- Not sticking to the Telegraph inverted commas rule which is: If you open inverted commas after a comma or a colon, then the full stop should appear before the close inverted commas. If you don’t, the the full stop or comma should come after the close inverted commas. If you quote text from a U.S. publication (and some U.K. publications) the full stop or comma is often before the close inverted commas when it shouldn’t be.
- When it comes to ellipses, if you’re cutting off a sentence you should put three dots with no space before the dots begin, but a space after the third dot; if the sentence has ended and you want to indicate that you’re cutting out some text, then you should put in the full stop, then a space, then three dots, then a space.
- People’s professional or official titles should have a capital letter, so Chief Medical Officer and Professor of Medicine, not chief medical officer and professor of medicine.
- Dates should be written like this June 26th, not like this 26 June, 26th June or June 26.
- Not correcting the z in words like ‘categorize’ when written in the American style. British English means using an s not a z for all such words.