Style Guide - contributing to this site

Don't type news headlines or event titles in capital letters. IT'S LIKE SHOUTING.

Use proper styles for headings, rather than simply making normal text bigger or bolder. Screen readers, other assistive technologies, and some more general-use programs such as Word and Adobe Acrobat understand and can make use of the semantic differences between the various levels of heading to create tables of contents, indexes and internal links.

• Each page should have a H1-level heading at the top (like the phrase 'Style Guide - contributing to this site' at the top of this page.
• use other pre-set headings (H2 and H3) elsewhere on the page.

This is an H2 heading

Followed by an H3.

(Other levels of heading are available. See our Text style and theme colours page to see the examples.)

Never spell out links in full.  They interrupt the reading flow and are unhelpful in this form for someone using a screen reader (which will of course announce it as it is written - 'http-colon-slash-slash-double-u-double-u-double-u...') This brief video (<2 minutes) demonstrates clearly how screen readers work with badly constructed links. (Actually you can jump to 42 seconds in if you're really in a hurry.) Anyway -

DON'T write sentences like:

Hamlin, Hamlin & McGill's criminal law specialist is Saul Goodman. You can find his profile at: http://www.hhm.com/people/partners/biography.html?person=saul.goodman

While it might be tempting to replace that long link above with the word 'here' (or the sentence 'click here to see his profile'), this is actually little or no better from the screen reader's perspective (particularly if there's more than one such link on a page) and in any case, is not the most compact or elegant turn of phrase, so instead...

DO hang links on relevant words or phrases, like this:

Hamlin, Hamlin & McGill's criminal law specialist is Saul Goodman.

(To do the same sort of thing when writing an email on most systems (including Outlook on Mac), select/copy the text you want to link from, click Ctrl-K (⌘-K) to Insert Hyperlink, and paste (Ctrl-V or ⌘-V) the full link into the popped-up dialog box. Click OK.)

* In fact much of the time people will choose to read even traditionally printed content (eg .pdf or .docx) on screen, and in the interests of reducing waste, this is to be encouraged. And of course if someone is going to visit a URL linked from a document, they will have to use their computer.

In short, there is a rarely a good reason for spelling out a URL rather than offering a link related to the relevant text, but in those cases where it is thought necessary - for example where the page or document is almost certain to be printed out - there is still usually no need to write it out in full, so:

• Leave off the intial 'http://' or 'https://', as modern browsers will assume the former, and automatically redirect to the latter if appropriate.
• If the closing bit of the url is, 'index.htm', 'index.html', 'index.shtml', 'index.php' or similar; or 'default.htm' etc., or 'home.htm' etc., you can leave that off too, for a similar reason.

(But remember, the actual underlying link does need to be complete.)

DON'T use:

Detailed instructions on how to use BiblioCite can be found at http://www.imaginarysoftware.com/bibliocite/index.html

User reviews of the software are at https://www.imaginarysoftware.com/bibliocite/reviews.html

DO use:

Detailed instructions on how to use BiblioCite can be found at www.imaginarysoftware.com/bibliocite/

User reviews of the software are at www.imaginarysoftware.com/bibliocite/reviews.html

While this is perhaps most obviously relevant in the case of news items, it does also apply to almost all pages, as you - the author - can never be sure when the item is being read. This means that text needs to be written in such a way that the item still makes sense long after the event, so:

DON'T use phrases like:

Last week a team from Lonsdale College won the Lance Todd Trophy for the third consecutive time.

OR

We will be introducing this new course next year.

DO use:

On 14 May 2020, a team from Lonsdale College…

We will be introducing this new course in the 2022-23 academic year.

For information about how to format dates and time (eg whether to use, "Feb 1st at 2.45 PM"^{see note} or "1 February at 14:45"), see the University Style Guide.

Note: While there are several approved ways to specify dates, this example is 'wrong' in five ways:

1. The number should come before the month.
2. There should be no, 'st', after the number.
3. The month should be spelled out in full.
4. 'PM' should be 'pm'.
5. The 'pm' should not be separated from the numbers by a space.

Text copied and pasted directly from Word or email can carry with it a bundle of hidden and usually unwelcome formatting, leading to blocks of content which sit uncomfortably with those around them, or with the other pages on the site. Often the differences are fairly subtle, like this:

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur.

and sometimes more obviously jarring, like this:

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur.

You can tidy the content as you paste...

While the edit tool does a good job of throwing away most of the extraneous material, it doesn't always catch everything, so be sure to check your page as if you were a normal site visitor after your edits.

You can tidy the content afterwards if necessary

If your page contains some odd formatting, it is a simple matter to strip it away and restore the standard house look. Simply select the problem text (or the whole page) and click the 'Remove Format' button, underlined in red in the image above. (Your edit bar may not look exactly like this one.) Importantly, this won't remove any links, but you will need to restore bold and italic text, so be sure you keep a copy or note of where they appear in advance.

DON'T use underlines

Underlined text can look a bit like a link, which is unhelpful, and also it's very old-fashioned, dating from the the days of the mechanical typewriter, when it was the only way to add emphasis to a word or phrase. Use bold to make something stand out, and italics to add emphasis.

• The following abbreviations don't take full-stops: Dr BCL MSt MSc MPhil MJur DPhil
• The University's Style Guide specifies that these common Latin abbreviations should take no punctuation: etc, eg, ie, ibid.
  They are only punctuated at all here because they are in a list, obviously!
  NB 'idem' is not an abbreviation.
• When using an abbreviation that may be unfamiliar to the expected audience - for example those that are 'special' to your field of interest - you should offer the full version together with the abbreviation the first time it appears, but can use just the abbreviation thereafter e.g.:

This website is partially compliant with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) version 2.1 AA standard.

then:

This page is fully compliant with the current WCAG standard.

Please see the guidance document
 

While the system does a good job of resizing images to be displayed correctly in all contexts, it's best to try to use images that are the right size in the first place.

On this website 'alt text' is a required field. Please fill this in with an appropriate description of the image. This is then used by screen reading technology to describe the image to a visually impaired user.

So perhaps improbably, turning to the Motown songbook for instruction, in the song 'I'll be There', the Jackson 5 were correct to sing, 'You and I must make a pact | We must bring salvation back', while in 'Reflections', Diana Ross and The Supremes were right with, 'I see reflections of you and me | Reflections of | The way life used to be'.

Or, if you prefer a more academic/literary example, it should be, 'Atticus Finch and I co-hosted a discussion at the conference', but 'Clarence Darrow joined Atticus and me at the conference dinner'.

A more complete discussion of the issue in Gowers' inimitable style can be found in the online version of the original edition of Plain Words. (The 2014 edition, revised by Rebecca Gowers, is not currently available online, but makes the same points.)