House style

Acronyms

• Avoid using too many acronyms. Consider your audience – will they know what the acronym means?
• If you are referring to an organisation or body with a long name several times in your copy, refer to it by its full title in the first instance and give the acronym in brackets afterwards – e.g. ‘Student accommodation is provided by Campus Living Villages (CLV).’
• This is not necessary for well-known organisations that are commonly referred to by their acronyms, like the BBC and the NHS.

Academics

• Don’t capitalise the word ‘academic’ or ‘academics’.
• Refer to Dr or Professor in the first instance – afterwards use their first name.

Ampersand (&)

• Only to be used in school logos, not in copy – e.g. ‘Staff at the School of Health and Society…’

Colon

• Use to introduce a quotation – e.g. ‘Professor Fernando said: “Today we marked the beginning of an ambitious project…”
• Or at the beginning of a list – e.g. ‘The researchers looked at various large mammals: wolves, bears and deer.’
• Or between two parts of sentence, where the first clause introduces an idea that is resolved by the second clause – e.g. ‘The research is conclusive: climate change is a reality.’

Date and time

• Dates to be written as Saturday 24 June 2017 or Tuesday 2 February (not Tuesday 02 February).
• Use the 24-hour clock – e.g. 17:00 or 09:00 (not 9:00).

Email addresses

• Use lower case for email addresses – e.g. enquiries@salford.ac.uk firstname.lastname@salford.ac.uk

Exclamation marks

• Consider your audience – if using, be sparing and only use in informal communications.
• Only use one – e.g. ‘Welcome back!’ not ‘Welcome back!!!’

Headings

• Headings for text-based paragraph types are automatically formatted in upper case.
• All other headings, including subheadings and titles used in accordions, should be formatted using sentence case, which is where the first letter of the first word in the header is capitalised.
• Subheadings can be added within the body copy of text paragraphs. These should be formatted using headings size 4, 5 or 6.
• Subheadings should be written in sentence case – e.g. Six things you didn’t know about Salford.

Numbering

• Numbers one to nine are written as words, 10 onwards is written numerically.
• Percentages should be written as X%.

Open Days and others events

• Event names like Open Days and Applicant Visit Days should be capitalised.
• Undergraduate Open Days and Postgraduate Open Days should also be capitalised.

Our name

• University of Salford, not Salford University, Salford Uni, UoS or The University of Salford (unless the sentence starts with ‘The University of Salford…’).

Other names

• New Adelphi not the New Adelphi.
• MediaCity not Media City.
• askUS should be written as shown.

Phone numbers

• Include the country code when listing phone numbers and format like this: +44 (0)161 295 4545 +44 (0)7123456786
• Don’t prefix the phone number with ‘T’, ‘tel’, or ‘telephone’.
• Always hyperlink phone numbers so that people using mobile devices can click to call. Create the hyperlink using the link feature in the text editor. In the input field for URL, type tel: before the phone number; this creates a click to call link – e.g. tel:+441612954545. The ‘tel:’ part of the link will not appear on your page.

Qualifications

• Master’s – lower case m and apostrophe (unless used at the start of a sentence).
• Undergraduate and postgraduate – lower case u and p (unless used at the start of a sentence).
• BA, BA (Hons), BSc, BEng, PgDip, PgCert, MA, MSc, MPhil, MEng, PhD.

Research

• Capitalise the names of research centres and groups – e.g. Centre for Applied Research in Health, Welfare and Policy.
• The titles of journals should be italicised – e.g. The International Journal of Marketing.

Schools

• Use the full name of a school when writing for the website, don’t use an abbreviation.
• Schools are capitalised when spelled in full (e.g. ‘School of Arts, Media and Creative Technology’), but the capital is dropped in shortened uses (e.g. ‘the school offers…’).
• The use of unspecific or plurals are not capitalised – e.g. ‘All schools must…’).

Semicolon

• Semicolons are used to connect two independent clauses that could otherwise be written as two separate sentences – e.g. ‘Students are being given the opportunity to shadow the Sports Tours International events team; there’s even the chance of a paid social media internship.’
• They can also be used in detailed lists – e.g. ‘Academics from across the USA attended the conference, including: Alex Case from the Audio Engineering Society; Carmen Hoover from Olympic College in Washington State; Kamilah Cummings from DePaul University in Chicago; and Sharon Davies from Middle Tennessee State University.’

Spaces

• Just use one space after a full stop, not two.

Courses and subject areas

• Use lower case when referring to subject areas – e.g. nursing, history, geography.
• For specific course titles use capitals – e.g. Civil and Architectural Engineering, Media and Performance.
• Use the award name when specifically referring to a student and their course – e.g. ‘Lauren, who’s studying BA (Hons) English Literature, recently finished a year studying abroad.’

Titles

(Publications, programmes, media etc.)

• The names of books, journals, newspapers, television programmes and album titles should be italicised – e.g. 
  A Taste of Honey by Shelagh Delaney
  The Journal of International Marketing
  The Guardian
  Coronation Street
  Louder Than Bombs by the Smiths
• See research for guidance on formatting the titles of research centres, groups and journal articles.

URLs

• URLs in web copy should be embedded as links.
• If a sentence ends with hyperlinked text, don’t omit the full stop, but make sure the full stop isn’t part of the link.

University

• When referring to a specific university, capitalise – e.g. ‘… at the University of Salford…’
• If referring to universities in general, don’t capitalise – e.g. ‘If you’re thinking of going to university…’
• Refer to the guidance under our name for further information about capitalisation.

The Vice-Chancellor and other role titles

• In the first instance, use the full job title and name – e.g. Vice-Chancellor, Professor Helen Marshall.
• After this just use the first name.