Style guide: technical guide

Abbreviations and acronyms

No full points or spaces between initials.
Spell out lesser-known abbreviations following first mention – National Gallery of Australia (NGA) – but only once.

Accents

Use on foreign words. Otherwise, use accents only if they affect pronunciation, so: café, cliché, communiqué, façade, fête, fiancée, mêlée, émigré, pâté, protégé, vis-á-vis.

Accents should be used on all names that usually take one, if our font allows for it.

Addresses

This is how they should look:

Gorman House Arts Centre.
55 Ainslie Avenue, Braddon.
ACT, 2612.

Ampersands

Generally no, but you can use one in company names when that’s what the company uses – Bang & Olufsen, Marks & Spencer etc. Check the company’s website for confirmation.

Book titles

For book titles cap up first letters of words in title except for the, a, and etc. – ‘She Left Me the Gun’. A title is denoted by single quotation marks. ‘Val Verde’.

Bullet points

Add a full point at the end of the bulleted list. Don’t use commas or apostrophes.

• Cheese
• Yabby jaffles
• Wine.

Always use the round bullet.

Capital letters

Document titles are lower case, e.g. Visual tone guide, Everything you need to know about everything. This goes for all written and printed documents and the blog.
Upper case for books (‘Brideshead Revisited’), artworks, films (‘The Shining’), poems (‘The Waste Land’), television shows (‘Transparent’), and place names (The Hague).

Use upper case for geographic regions and for vague definitions when they’re widely recognised, e.g. the Middle East, South Atlantic, East Asia, the West (as in the decline of the West; adjective, Western), the Gulf, the North Atlantic, Southeast Asia, the Midlands, Central America, the West Country.
Job titles – cap up titles (i.e. names), but not job description, e.g. Creative Director Nectar Efkarpidis (but the hotel’s creative director, Nectar Efkarpidis).

Use upper case for some historical terms – the Renaissance, the Restoration, the Depression, the New Deal, the Middle Ages.
Use upper case for geographic regions and for vague definitions when they’re widely recognised, e.g. the Middle East, South Atlantic, East Asia, the West (as in the decline of the West; adjective, Western), the Gulf, the North Atlantic, Southeast Asia, the Midlands, Central America, the West Country.

Use upper case for the locator only of a Hotel Hotel space, e.g. the Mosaic room; the Monster kitchen and bar; the Salon and Dining rooms.

City names

Use anglicised versions of city names for those that have come into the language: Venice not Venezia, Beijing not Peking. Always check the political appropriateness of city names when in doubt e.g. Mumbai not Bombay. We don’t side with the colonisers but with the colonised.

Cocktails

Write cocktail names in upper case (Bloody Mary, Gin Sling, Mojito, Martini).

Commas

Don’t put a comma before the “and” for the last item in a list (an Oxford comma). “For lunch we have starters, main course, dessert and coffee.” But you can use a comma to separate the list from a separate thought or clause: “For lunch we have starters, main course, dessert and coffee, and Mojo Juju will be playing in the Mosaic room.”

Company names

Use the names they use themselves, but not weird typographical devices used in their logos – Bulgari not Bvlgari. If they like to use lower case, use it unless it’s at the start of a sentence, “EasyJet doesn’t fly to Canberra,” or if it just looks strange. For example, we use Hungerford and Edmunds, not hungerford + edmunds.

Our own name should always be spelt out in full – Hotel Hotel.

Our parent company is referred to as Molonglo Group (not the Molonglo Group).

Compass points

Lower case for these e.g. northeast, southwest, etc.

Dashes

To break up sentences we prefer using an en dash to a colon. Hitting alt and the hyphen key creates an en dash (so called because it’s the width of the letter n). For example, “The Salon and Dining rooms are an homage to post war immigration to Australia and the eclectic-kitsch tastes that came with it – shattered terrazzo floors and floral carpets, Greek oil paintings alongside German neon prints.”

We use em dashes when we credit someone for a quote (“Life is very long. — T.S. Elliott”). You can make an em dash on Macs with shift, option, dash. Make an em dash on PCs by pressing alt, and 0151.

Dates

Sunday 22 May, 2016. If you have limited space (for example the ‘What’s on’ or content in a table can be abridged to Sun 22 May.

The 1920s, the 1980s, the third century, the 19th century, 21st-century life.

Seasons are all lower case – spring, autumn and winter packages.
The days of the week and months are capitalised.

Document titles

Document titles are lower case, e.g. Visual tone guide, Everything you need to know about everything. This goes for all written and printed documents and the blog.

Emails

Subject lines must start with the business name and a vertical slash (e.g., “HH | Tone of voice”).

Image attributions

Image credits are essential and should look like this: Image, em dash, ‘artwork name in single quotation marks’ by name of artist, date. I.e.,

Image – ‘Clouds’ by John Baldessari, 2009.

Ize or ise?

We use ise (recognise, realise, organise).

Measurements

These should be given as follows

• 90 km/h
• 10 sq m
• 45c
• 100ml
• 30cm
• 2tbsps
• 1/3 tsp
• 200g
• 20 miles
• 5 metres (the number should be the numeral, not the word)

Metric or imperial

Generally use metric for everything and convert where necessary.

Naming conventions

Give first name and surname on first mention only. You can use just the first name or just the surname after that depending on how close you are with the subject.

Newspapers and magazines

The Saturday Paper has The capitalised but the Daily Telegraph, the New York Times, the Observer and the Spectator don’t (but it’s Le Monde, DieWelt, Die Zeit).

Numbers

Numbers one to nine are spelt out, numbers from 10 upward should be written as numerals. Two million people. 25 million people.

In lists of figures that include numerals higher than 10, use all numerals: “He ordered cocktails number 11, 7, and 3.”

Use figures in percentages and percentage points. 3%. 4.5%.

Use commas in thousands – 1,000; 23,564 etc.

A billion = 1,000 million. A trillion = 1,000 billion. Use m and bn only with sums of money: $50m but 50 million people.

Organisations and government agencies

Generally use upper case when written in full e.g. the National Gallery of Australia, the Asylum Seekers Resource Centre. Once you have written it in full, write the acronym in parentheses and from then on refer to the acronym.

“We are partnering with the National Gallery of Australia (NGA) on the ‘Landscape Artists Over Time’ exhibition. Toot. The NGA are great.”

Parentheses

If the sentence is grammatically complete without the information contained within the parentheses, the punctuation stays outside the brackets. (A complete sentence that stands inside the parentheses starts with a capital letter and ends with a full point.)

Places

Lower case except for the locator: A. Baker courtyard, the Mosaic room, Monster kitchen and bar, Salon and Dining rooms.

Position descriptions

Are written in an active voice. E.g. Write “Develop, establish and drive all sales processes and performances” vs. “Develops, establishes…”.

Possessive apostrophes

When the word ends in s, be guided by how the plural is spoken. If the final s is soft, use an apostrophe: Johnathan Efkarpidis’ report. Otherwise, use apostrophe-s: Keats’s ‘Ode to a Nightingale’.
Plural nouns should be apostrophe-s if possessive: people’s champion, children’s hospital.

The apostrophe should be used in phrases expressing time where the time period modifies the noun (two weeks’ holiday), but not when it modifies an adjective (two weeks old).

Quotation marks

Use double quotation marks to quote people.

“You’re committing your work to fire. Of course you’ve got to be relaxed with what the outcome is”, said Karen.
If a whole sentence in quotation marks is at the end of a longer sentence, the final full stop should be inside the inverted commas.

Use single quotation marks for title names, prefaces, captions etc.

Quotes used in Hotel Hotel collateral are presented without quotation marks and are credited with an em dash and the author’s name:
Life is very long.
— T.S. Elliot

Recipes

Use metric measurements: 200g, 2kg, 200ml

Fractions should be: ½, 1 ½

Cooking times should be numeric: cook for 2 minutes

Teaspoon – tsp (plural tsps)

Tablespoon – tbsp (plural tbsps)
And follow this style:

Roasted tomato soup

(Serves 2 to 4)

700g tomatoes

2 garlic cloves

Half a lemon

Salt and pepper

1 tsp sugar

4 tsps extra virgin olive oil

5-6 tsps Tabasco

A few basil leaves

The method

Roast the tomatoes and garlic in preheated oven (200C) for 30 minutes. Place in a blender, add olive oil and sugar and blend for 30 seconds.
Season with salt, pepper, Tabasco and lemon juice and serve warm or chilled, garnished with basil and tomato slices.

Semi-colons

Should be used to create a pause in a sentence that’s longer than a comma but shorter than a full stop.

Spelling

For spellings not included here, generally use the first variant given in Collins Dictionary. Always do a spelling and grammar check to find any glaring mistakes. Make sure you’re dictionary isn’t set to U.S.

Swear words

It’s okay to drop the odd swear word in the online world (we’re talking blog; never, ever swear to guests in emails or in person… Ever.) Keep it clean though. Never drop a ‘c-bomb’, never use swearing as a form of hate. The occasional ‘shit’ and ‘fuck’ can fly but use it to make a point, never gratuitously. Again, never swear in marketing collateral.

Telephone numbers

They should look like this +612 6287 682.

Time

The format is numerals and AM and PM in upper case: from 11AM to 2PM. Use a full stop for non rounded times: 2.30PM to 2.45PM.

Websites

No http or www in addresses. If two websites are given, separate with a semi-colon.