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Proofed | Editors | Emeritus | Harvard Medical School (HMS) Style Guide | PELP

Key Style Guide Information and Links

This card covers style guidance for HMS e-learning and marketing documents.

Bold green indicates the preference for this school/the specified courses.

Use 'Professor' and 'Dr.'
When abbreviating, refer to Harvard Medical School as "the School" or as "HMS" after first mention.
HMS-PELP: Example of how full faculty titles should be presented:

Beth Frates, MD

Clinical Assistant Professor

Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation

Harvard Medical School

See the Title Case Converter to confirm correct capitalization for title/sentence casing.

Use AP Title Case for names and designations.
The term "capstone" (e.g., capstone project) should be lowercase unless at the beginning of a sentence or in a header.

Headers: AP Title Case (the word "through" should remain lowercase unless used as the first word)
Headers in marketing content: CMoS Title Case
Subheaders:

HMS-PELP: sentence case
HMS-PELP: The "Additional Information" subheader under videos should be written in title case.

Program titles, module titles, and module topics should be written in title case.

For e-learning content, do not use the serial comma unless necessary to aid comprehension.
For marketing content, do use the serial comma.
HMS-PELP: PhD, etc. with no periods.
For e-learning content, use a spaced em dash.
For marketing content, parenthetical dashes: Use spaced em dashes. Exceptions: No spaces should be used around the em dash in brochures or month in the life (MITL) documents.
For marketing content, for singular nouns ending in s, to make them possessive, just add an apostrophe (e.g. Emeritus')
No italics in marketing mailer subject lines.
For number ranges and joining terms of equal weight:

Some ordinals (e.g., referring to geographic or political order) should always be numerals, e.g., 3rd District Court, 9th ward.

Use numerals for referring to currency up to $999,999.
For cents or amounts of $1 million or more, spell out units (cents, million, billion, etc.).

HMS-PELP: AP title case for titles in running text and in lists of readings in the simple form "Example Article Title (Smith, 2023)"

A reference to a generative AI tool being used in the creation of content should appear in the following format:

e.g., OpenAI. (2024). ChatGPT (Mar 14 version) [Large language model]. https://chat.openai.com/
e.g., OpenAI. (2024). DALL-E (Oct 8 version) [Image creator]. https://openai.com/dall-e-2

Exceptions to Webster/variants preferred by HMS:

Alzheimer’s disease
amid / among (no "-st")
anesthesia, not anaesthesia (except in academic titles or British usage)
attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD)
blended learning (not blended-learning)
cesarean section, but C-section
clinician-educator, clinician-investigator, clinician-leader, clinician-researcher, clinician-
scholar, clinician-scientist
decision making (noun) / decision-making (adjective)
email
health care: two words!!
high-impact
Huntington's disease
in-person
life span
livestream, livestreaming
Lyme disease
nonprofit
okay (not OK)
online
on demand (not hyphenated)
opioid addiction, opioid use (not abuse)
patient-oriented
pediatrics, not paediatrics (except in titles or British usage)
skill set (not skillset, skill-set)
startup
subspecialist
T cell, but T-cell count
team-based
television (not TV)
trans fat (no italics)
type 1 diabetes, type 2 diabetes
United States (noun in running text) / US (adjective)
up-to-date
well-being
website
world-class
x-ray (both when adjective and noun)

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