Proofed | Editors | Emeritus | Imperial College London Business School (IMP) | Marketing Content Style Guide

The notes below refer to IMP marketing materials. This guide should not be used for IMP learning content.

IMPORTANT NOTES:

• 'Programme' and not 'course' (the only exception is that 'course' may used where character limitation is an issue).
• All copy to be left aligned and in sentence case (Except for the programme name and google text ad headlines).

General Emeritus Marketing Content Guidelines

Proofreading approach: For proofreading jobs, we should be performing a light proofread. Emeritus do not need us to make suggestions to the content or language of the documents. They are only interested in:

1. Grammar errors
2. Spelling errors
3. Punctuation errors
4. Style guide errors

Global comments in PDFs: The marketing team would prefer if we leave global comments for repeated issues in a document. This is for any issues that Emeritus could quickly fix with a find-and-replace or are obvious in the document. We should still make full changes for less-obvious issues, such as serial commas. For example, we can leave global comments for:

1. Adding a hyphen to all instances of "decision making"
2. Replacing all instances of "course" with "programme"
3. Removing full stops from all bullet lists

Global comments in Google Docs: Whenever possible, use the replace all function instead of making the same change in multiple identical instances. For example:

1. Replacing all instances of "decision making" with "decision-making"
2. Replacing all instances of "course" with "programme"

Using "company"/"firm"/"organisation":

1. We should only use synonyms when it's repetitive, and consider the meaning – don't use them interchangeably
2. We can use "business" as well
3. "Company" should be the last choice – "organisation," "business," and "firm" are OK

Dialect

• Dialect is UK English (except in a direct quote from a written source, where we can maintain the original text's language variety).
• Please change '-ize' endings for the UK English '-ise' throughout.
• Refer to the Oxford English Dictionary.

Capitalization

• Use sentence case throughout for all headings (but capitalise proper nouns as you normally would). Exceptions are CMoS title case for:
• Programme titles
• Module titles
• Headlines in text ads headlines
• Don't capitalise names of disciplines, sectors, practices, etc. if they are not the official title (e.g. She wanted to pursue a career in machine analytics).
• Capitalise specific job titles (He was appointed Dean of Imperial College Business School) but not generic references to job titles (He want to be dean of a college).
• Sentence case for titles of webpages, articles, and sections within an article
• Capitalise "College" and "School" when referring to Imperial, even if the full name isn't given.

Punctuation

• No serial comma, except when required for clarity.
• For singular nouns ending in s, to make them possessive, add an apostrophe and an s (e.g. Emeritus's)
• Professor should not be abbreviated to ‘Prof’ in written communication.
• A colon should be used to introduce a quote. Double quotation marks should be used for direct quotes. If a quote appears within a quote, single quotation marks should be used within double quotation marks.
• Single quotes signify unfamiliar words or phrases.
• Contracted titles such as Dr, Mr and Mrs should not be followed by a full stop.
• United States (noun in running text) / US (adjective)
• No full stops in academic qualifications (PhD, MSc etc.)
• Master's and not masters or master's.
• Leave out the full stop after initials in names; e.g. John B Adams.
• The first word after the colon should not be capitalised unless it is a proper noun.

Numbers, time, dates

• Spell in full all numbers up to and including nine, numerals from 10 onwards (but spell out numbers in full at the beginning of a sentence). Exception:
• Programme duration (e.g. 2-month course; the course runs for 2 months)
• Large numbers: e.g. one million (and not 1 million) up to nine million, From there, 10 million, etc.
• Spell numbers in full at the beginning of a sentence.
• Ordinals (2nd, 1st, 14th etc.) should not be used - except for centuries, see below.
• Degree classifications: 2.1 (not 2:1).
• 1,800 – not 1800
• per cent preferable in body text and % in tables or lists
• two thirds – not two-thirds
• Dates, e.g.: 20 November 2015; 9 August; summer; 2008–09; 21st century
• Times: 09.30, 18.00 (24-hr clock)
• In mailer subject lines: use numerals for all numbers.

Dashes, hyphens

• Use spaced parenthetical en dashes.
• Use unspaced en dashes for number/date ranges and to join terms of equal weight.

Style notes

• Aim for clear text: professional but approachable (www.plainenglish.co.uk)
• Use second person pronouns to speak directly to the students (In this course, you will learn...) not 'we'
• Use 'amid', 'among' and 'while' and not 'amidst', 'amongst', or 'whilst'.
• Use 'learned' and not 'learnt'
• Avoid exclamation marks.
• Foreign words should be in italics.
• For collective nouns, such as group, team, department, faculty or staff, use singular verbs.
• Ampersands should be used in programme names (MSc Investment & Wealth), names of departments/research centres (Economics & Public Policy) and in job titles (Professor of Analytics & Operations). In addition, ‘&’ is permissible on social media communication where there is character limit. Otherwise, avoid using ampersands.
• Bold should be used sparingly to highlight individual words – entire sentences should not be bold
• Italics should be used for publication titles (e.g. books, journals, newspapers, reports, films, songs, works or art etc.).
• In mailer subject lines: no italics, and use numerals for all numbers.

Bullets

• Full stops only for full-sentences bullet points.
• Capitalise the first letter for all bullet points.

ABBREVIATIONS

• Spell out the term the first time it's used, followed by the abbreviation in round brackets thereafter (do not use the acronym if it does not appear later in the text).
• Common abbreviations do not need to be written in full, e.g. MBA, BBC
• Full stops should be used following abbreviations for which the last letter of the abbreviation is not the same as the last letter of the full word, e.g. Hon. Secretary

CONTACT DETAILS

• Telephone numbers: +44 (0)20 7594 XXXX
• Always use the international dialling code
• All email addresses written in lower case
• Telephone, fax and mobile number, email addresses and websites preceded by T:, F:, M:, E:: and W:
• imperial.ac.uk/business-school – not www.imperial.ac.uk/business-school (i.e. remove www. from the beginning of URLs, unless doing so breaks the link).

Social media ads

• In images (labelled "creatives"), no periods after imperative sentences unless there are two or more sentences.

landing pages

• Do not edit the FAQs – just check that the correct program title is used.

Subject-specific terms and phrases

Also see this page for a brief list of hyphenated/non-hyphenated and one-word or two-word spellings

References to Imperial College Business School

• Imperial College Business School (or 'the Business School' or 'the School') – not 'ICBS', 'BS', 'Imperial Business School', etc.
• 'Alumni' when referring to the department and not 'alumni'
• Executive Education – not executive education (when referring to the department)
• 'Department of Finance' and not 'Finance Department'
• 'Careers' or 'careers consultants' – not Careers & Professional Development Service, Careers Service, etc.
• Imperial College London – not Imperial College, the College, or just Imperial