Proofed | Editors | Emeritus | Wharton Business School (WH) Marketing Content Style Guide

General Notes

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

Use AP first and then CMoS for anything not contained in the above (but CMoS title case).

Use Merriam-Webster for any spelling issues.

Dialect is US English.

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: 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 "program"
3. Removing full stops from all bullet lists

Using "company"/"firm"/"organization":

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 – "organization," "business," and "firm" are OK

SCHOOL/DIVISION NAME

• When referring to the school, it is "Wharton" or "The Wharton School" (at the beginning of a sentence) or "the Wharton School" (in body text). Never use "The Wharton School of Business".
• Acceptable division names:
• Aresty Institute of Executive Education
• Wharton Executive Education (to be used in ads)
• Wharton Exec Ed (to be used if character restraints)
• When referring specifically to The Wharton School, the School should be capitalized.
• Example: The Wharton School regularly updates the curriculum to reflect the most current practices and trends in business. The School will be rolling out a redesigned undergraduate curriculum next year.

Capitalization

• Sentence case for headers and subheaders.
• Program titles, module titles, and module topics should be written in CMoS title case.
• Don’t capitalize titles/roles if they appear casually or generally, e.g. "As technology’s importance increases, so does that of the chief technology officer (CTO)."
• The first word after a colon should be capitalized only if it is a proper noun or the start of a full sentence.
• Generic faculty titles should be lowercase if they follow the name and uppercase if they precede the name.
• Examples: Corinne Low, assistant professor of business economics and public policy; Associate Professor Corinne Low, who teaches in the Business Economics and Public Policy department...
• Any title that appears without a name will be lowercase. E.g. The dean was missing.
• If there is a schoolwide endowed (named) professorship mentioned in addition to a professor’s appointment in a department, list both titles (capitalized), separated by a semicolon, with the endowed professorship first: e.g., Michael Useem, William and Jacalyn Egan Professor; Professor of Management.
• "The" before "the Wharton School" should not be capitalized in running text, but it should be when it's its own entity (e.g., "John Smith is a professor at the Wharton School" but "John Smith, Professor of Logic, The Wharton School").
• "Marketing Analytics Playbook", but "playbook".
• Key takeaways (sentence case).
• In title case, the second word in a hyphenated term is always capitalized.
• Professor John Smith, but John Smith, PhD, professor of finance.

PROGRAM NAME

• Program name should always be italicized. This applies to abbreviated forms as well.
• In case the entire text (para) is italicized, keep the program name as normal. The idea is to make it stand out.

Punctuation

• Use the serial comma (However, if an official department name doesn’t have a serial comma, don’t add it, e.g. Associate Professor of Operations, Information and Decisions).
• For singular nouns ending in s, to make them possessive, just add an apostrophe (e.g. Emeritus')
• Use semicolons in lists where the items contain commas (e.g. I have been to Austin, Texas; Boston, Massachusetts; and Miami, Florida).
• Be sure to use FANBOY commas for independent clauses, particularly with 'and'.
• Wharton is fine with not using commas with multiple adjectives (e.g. two-day on-campus networking)
• Academic titles and qualifications (Dr, PhD, MD, MBA, etc.) do not contain periods.
• Initials in names will have a period, e.g., Eric T. Bradlow
• Use a.m. and p.m. (with periods)
• Hyphenate all compound modifiers (e.g. private-equity leaders, idea-creation framework, ex-ante analysis)

Numbers, time, dates, PRICE

• Never use superscript for ordinal numbers.
• All numbers below (not incl.) 10 should be spelled out in text (not in graphs, email subject lines, or social media)
• Use 'percent' and not 'per cent' or '%'. However, acceptable to use '%' in infographics, tables, and stats.
• Use numbers in running text with percentages (e.g. 26 percent) but spell out the number if it begins a sentence.
• Dates can be represented as February 14 and 14 February. Never use superscript (th/nd etc.). Use as follows: 'December 1983' or 'February 17, 1958'
• Don't abbreviate days and months.
• Use 12-hour style for time and figures with a.m. and p.m (e.g. 1 a.m., 3:30 p.m., 11:00 a.m.–12:30 p.m).
• Use US$ instead of USD [Note for mailers: the use of USD is acceptable).

Style notes

• Use 'organization' and not 'business' or 'company' or 'firm' ('firm' may be used if there are too many instances of 'organisation' in a paragraph).
• Use 'employees' or 'candidates' (instead of 'people' or 'individuals').
• Use the second person to speak to the learner “You will learn…” (not "we").
• Months should not be abbreviated (but allowed in social/google ads where space is an issue).
• Covid is spelled as COVID-19.
• Program titles should be put in italics (including abbreviated forms of the title), as should book/journal titles as per CMoS (but not in mailer subject lines).
• Use active verbs instead of passive constructions.
• Names: [Academic/Professional Title] Firstname Surname in first instance, then [Academic Title] Surname.
• Over and more than: Use “more than” when you mean in excess of or greater than. Use “over” when you mean higher in position or when referring to age. Example: More than 50 students in the class are over 21.
• Don't use ampersands (&) unless part of a brand name/there is a space issue.
• Abbreviations and acronyms Use full title in first reference; use acronym in subsequent reference.
• Use italics for book titles, course titles, journal titles, newspaper titles, radio and television series, movies, plays, magazines, and online newspapers and magazines.
• Use italics for a job designation that stands alone under a name (e.g. essentially serving as a header in a "Meet the Faculty" section).
• Wharton prefers using the term ‘On Campus’ rather than ‘In Person’.
• 'including' is preferred to 'such as' where possible.

Bullets

• NO PERIODS for bullet points, even if they are complete sentences. (Exception: when the bullet point consists of two sentences or more, where there should be terminal punctuation. If this is the case, to maintain consistency, all the other bullets in that section will also have periods).

Dashes, hyphens

• Use spaced em dashes. Exceptions: No spaces should be used around the em dash in brochures or month in the life (MITL) documents.
• Use the en dash with no spaces for number ranges.

tECHNOLOGICAL v. tECHNOLOGY

• Technological – change, advances, innovation, challenges, disruption, resources
• Technology – solutions, strategies, trends
• Say ‘disruptive technology’ instead of ‘technological disruption’

landing pages

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

social media ads

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

MAILERS

• ‘USD’ can be used for price.

EMAIL SUBJECT LINES

• Sentence case
• Spell out "percent"
• No periods if one sentence, but a period needs to be added to the end of the subject if there are two or more sentences.
• No italics
• Use numerals for all numbers.

Subject-specific terms and phrases

Any terms that aren't listed here or in the style guide, Google to see common usage/be internally consistent and leave a comment for Emeritus to check/tell the ops team so that we can add the terms to the list.

• add-on (noun, adjective), add on (verb)
• back end (noun), back-end (adjective)
• best practices (not best practice)
• co-founder, co-director, co-chairperson etc.
• coursework
• coworker
• COVID-19
• database
• data set
• deal making (noun)/ deal-making (adjective)
• decision making (noun)/decision-making (adjective)
• design thinking (noun)/design-thinking (adjective)
• deep dive (noun, not verb)
• dot-com
• email, ecommerce, etc.
• hands-on
• health care
• homepage
• interdisciplinary
• internet, intranet (i.e., lowercase).
• key takeaways
• life cycle
• login (noun, adjective), log in (verb)
• long term (noun)/long-term (adjective)
• multidisciplinary, multinational, etc.
• noncredit, nonprofit, etc.
• OK
• online
• opt-in (noun, adjective)
, opt in (verb)
• prerequisite, but pre-term
• real time (noun)/ real-time (adjective)
• road map
• signup (noun, adjective), sign up (verb)
• skill set (don't use plural 'skill sets')
• startup
• trade-offs (not tradeoffs).
• United States (noun in running text) / US (adjective)
• URL
• website
• WiFi
• World Wide Web/web
• Work-from-home: Use hyphens when it used as both a noun and adjective, e.g. “Work-from-home policies” and “The challenges of work-from-home”, i.e. where, in the latter, it’s specifically the name of the activity. If this was changed for the gerund, however, there would be no hyphens (“The challenges of working from home”), same as when used as a verb phrase (He was told to work from home).

sepo notes

• Do not use an en dash for complex range hyphenation in running text
• Correct: 9- to 12-month
• Incorrect: 9–12-month
• Hyphenation:
• noun – "decision making"
• adjective – "decision-making"
• Bullet lists: no periods
• Subheaders: sentence case
• Don't capitalize "success coach" unless preceding a person's name
• Don't make changes to module titles
• Standard usage for introducing criteria: inclusions/exclusions, not included/excluded
• No colon to introduce "call to action" (i.e., clickable) buttons