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 current Government of a country or state. For generic references to government or to a previous 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 en dashes – (option, dash) rather than dashes – (dash). The Exception to this rule is when writing an ‘Excerpt’, in which case use dashes because there is a 222 character limit for ‘Excerpts’ and en dashes take up four characters.
Dates: use full out months, September 22nd, October 21st. Not September 22, not 22 September. Don’t abbreviate months, so not Sept. Always put the date after the month, so September 22nd, not 22nd September.
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 or due to an interruption, in which case use this …
Initials: use initials but don’t put full stops after them. So JK Rowling, not J.K. Rowling.
For the UK and the US, use ‘UK’ and ‘US’.
Don’t 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). With Mail stories, just refer to the paper as the Mail, so don’t differentiate between MailOnline, the Mail on Sunday, Mail.com and the Mail. Just use the Mail.
Use curly inverted and double inverted commas, not straight, except in the blurbs which reproduce on our socials, where use straight. (Curly ones use three characters on X.) On a Mac, 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+[. Note that WordPress usually automatically converts inverted commas into the correct curly ones on the front end, however they appear in the editor.
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 to link to newspaper and magazine stories that aren’t behind paywalls – so the Mail, the Sun and the Guardian, rather than Mail+, 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). So Panorama but not the BBC.
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.
People: very well known figures may simply be called by their first names, 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 to them 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 full stop 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: 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, e.g. 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 thereafter..
Phrases in other languages: italicise – et al. Italicise, but 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.
Capitalise the Blob/Green Blob and when using a forward slash like that don’t leave a space either side, so Blob/Green Blob, not Blob / Green Blob.
Versus abbreviated to vs.
Nimby – not nimby or NIMBY.
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 full stops and commas generally occur 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, unless a new sentence begins within the quote, in which case the full stop goes 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, author), 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, 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. Example:
“This is Reeves’s most humiliating U-turn yet” – It’s no surprise that markets expect a lender’s premium when Labour have proven themselves so irresponsible, says Matthew Lynn in the Telegraph.
Try not to repeat the verb before the author’s name, so alternate between “say” (as above), “reports” and “according to”. Where you name the author, you can use either “writes“, “argues” or “says”.
Headlines: Capitalise Each Word Except Minor Words (of, and, etc.) As a general rule, words of three letters or more should be capitalised, apart from “and”.
Use Stop Press: (emboldened like that) to add addendums at the bottom of related stories. Embolden the colon as well as the words “Stop Press”.
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 screenshot newspaper pictures. 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.
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.
Landscape images only. To make sure the part of the image you want to show up shows up, you’ll need to screenshot an image to make it quite oblong. Don’t know the exact dimensions. But you can work it out via trial and error by using the preview button which shows you how a piece will appear when it’s published.
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 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.
Use H3 Heading for subheadings – these will look right on the newsletter (don’t use H1, H2 or H4 as this will look odd eg too big).
Koran not Quran
Sites and Substacks we can publish in full:
Brownstone Institute
Eugyppius
Trust the Evidence (Carl Heneghan and Tom Jefferson)
Dystopian Down Under (Rebekah Barnett)
Igor Chudov
Making (Covid) Waves in Japan (Guy Gin)
C.J. Strachan
David McGrogan
Ian Price
Eyal Shahar – Medium Substack
Michael Senger
A Midwestern Doctor
New Conservative
David Turver
https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/
The Climate Skeptic – useful sites for finding stories for the Climate Round-Up:
WUWT?
NoTricksZone
Climate Scepticism
NetZeroWatch
Clintel
Climate Change Dispatch
CO2 Coalition
Real Clear Energy
Discussion
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