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Freelance house style

YOU CAN save the editors a deal of trouble when submitting your reports by following our house style. If you're new to freelancing, you should know that deducing the house style of the publication you're submitting to, and following it, is a very useful way to show yourself to be co-operative and diligent.

What is our "house style"? It is this publication's collection of sub-editing policies. It deals with matters on which the rules of grammar are silent, but a decision is required in order to be consistent across all articles and minimise the opportunities for tripping readers up. And of course avoiding tripping readers up - making their way smooth - is an important part of sub-editing. We need to bear in mind that many readers have a first language other than English.

Submitting copy that fits the house style has the additional advantage of subtly indicating that you have read the publication - always a good idea when pitching your piece.

Newspapers' style books can run to a hundred pages, recording the Chief Sub's every decision. We'll try to stick to the key points:

  • The Oxford English Dictionary is your guide to spelling, except for the cases where it prefers "ize" etc over British English common usage "ise".
  • All acronyms and intialisms are spelled out at first use, except "BBC" and "NATO". And even those we frequently spell out. We never use full points (full stops) in acronyms or intialisms. In print editions of the Freelance, "NUJ" is acceptable because readers presumably know the abbreviation for the body they joined; but "LFB" should be explained as London Freelance Branch because members of LMB read it too.
  • Figures 0-9 are spelled out zero-nine unless they form part of a sequence or comparison: as in, for example, "62 per cent of those surveyed approved and 3 per cent had no view". The thousands separator is a comma; four-digit numbers do not have a comma.
  • Quotes are double, always, except quotes within quotes and quotes in headlines. In text use plain quotes " and in HTML use ". What your teacher said is not relevant here. This is newspaper style, as decided by the Chief Subs of UPI, the Guardian, New Scientist and the Freelance.
  • Apostrophes and single quotes are both plain ', except in headlines where in HTML we use ’ (’) despite the risk of it confusing very old browsers.
  • Quotes in headlines are always single ‘thus’: in HTML ‘thus’). Quotes within quotes in headlines are verboten. Always rewrite to avoid these.
  • When the text quoted is a sentence - even if it is not the whole of the sentence in the original - the full point goes inside the quotes; otherwise, it goes outside. The Chief Sub said "this is correct." So, too, "is this".
  • Dates are in the form DD Mumblember YYYY. If they are the dates of future events to which we are alerting readers they are bolded - in HTML enclosed in <strong> tags thus: 6 August 2045.
  • The names of publications, programmes (such as Listen with Mother), podcast series and ships are italicised - in HTML using <cite>.
  • The titles of articles in publications, episodes of programme series, and so on are in double quotes.
  • An organisation is a singular thing, even if it is in a sense made of people. Thus:
    Mummetshire County Council has instructed its press officers not to speak to three area journalists who have criticised it.
  • We minimise use of capital letters. Use "the Council" only when this is short for a particular, previously named, council. Always lowercase "government", and so on.
  • Personal names: Firstname Lastname at first mention and - this is more relaxed than is yet common - Firstname subsequently, unless there is more than one Afifa in the story. No "Mrs" or "Mr" or whatever; and no titles unless they add useful information ("Lady Muggins said in parliament") or it's seriously politic to mention that she's "Dr Lady Muggins" (no full point).
  • Organisational names: we name them exactly the way they name themselves: hence "World Trade Organization" with a "z" but "Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development".
  • We put phrases in languages other than English in italics - in HTML using <cite>. The OED is your standard for whether the phrase has been absorbed into English: if it is not absorbed it will be in italics in the dictionary.
  • If stress really, really cannot be conveyed through the perfection of your prose alone, we use italics - in HTML with the <em> tag.
  • We give web addresses in the form www.example.edu - the point being to flag to readers that this is a web address. In the rare cases in which the "www." form does not work we use the form that does work - example.edu for example - and ensure that the copy makes clear to less-online readers that this is a web address.
  • In print, we never have a web address immediately followed by punctuation. This is because a reader who does not understand the syntax of web addresses may type the punctuation as part of the address, which then will not work. As always, the answer is to rewrite to avoid the issue. We may simply omit a full point after a web address at the end of a sentence.
  • In print, if we have to direct readers to a very long web address we either create a www.bit.ly/ShortAddress or refer them to the online version of the article.

Some notes on punctuation

The rules of punctuation are universal rules of the language, so the following notes should not strictly be part of a style guide. Perhaps, though, they will, despite being incomplete, assist you.

Punctuation marks form a hierarchy. From strongest to weakest:

  • The full stop or full point appears only at the end of a sentence. Never use two spaces after a full point, or after any other punctuation mark. Ignore anything a teacher said to you about this: the old rule of using two spaces in commercial correspondence dates from the time when it was bashed out on a mechanical typewriter.
  • We use the colon (:) only in two ways:
    1. to introduce a list of items, such as this one;
    2. to join two sentences, where the first sentence implies or necessitates or, sometimes, is illustrated by the second.
  • We use the semicolon (;) only to delimit the items in a list that we introduced with a colon.
    • There is one other grammatically-correct use of a semicolon, which is to join two sentences without the sense of implication that would be marked by a colon; it is almost always better to promote these semicolons up to a full point and rewrite as necessary.
  • We avoid parentheses ((...)), except to set off tiny examples such as this one, or when defining an acronym. When a sentence occurs inside parentheses, the reader is justified in asking: was it too parenthetical to be worth including at all? If it stays in, re-write without using parentheses, often using phrases such as "for example" or "in particular", or simply use parenthetical commas. People often mis-name parentheses as "brackets" - strictly, brackets are [...].
  • We use brackets ([...]) only where it is necessary to insert words into a direct quote - for example:
    The case, the judge said, was "one of the most complicated to come before us and it is to her credit that she [Esther Summerson] has such a fine grasp of the essentials".
  • The correct uses of commas are hardest to describe. The simplest is, probably, "parenthetical commas" which have the same logical function as parentheses (see above) and must therefore appear in pairs. A good rule of thumb is that to use a comma where a colon or a semicolon would be correct is usually wrong and always inelegant, almost always these commas should be promoted to full points with rewriting as needed. Note that the preceding is an example of an incorrect use.
  • Dashes - strictly, en rules - are informal but the Freelance makes fairly frequent use of them. They can stand in for any other punctuation except a full point or brackets. They are probably most useful - as here - to set off parenthetical phrases. Online, we use a hyphen character (-) because – does not work in all browser programs.

Web addresses

The web address of this document is http://www.londonfreelance.org/fl/style.html

What we've called a "web address" is technically a "URL" for Uniform Resource Locator. Let's break it down into its parts, because doing so helps us publish them correctly:

  • http:// the "protocol" that the reader's computer should use to process the link. HTTP is the Hyper-Text Transfer Protocol, which is to say the Web. When making a link out of a web page to an external site it is essential to include this in the <a href="">. The other link protocols still in common use are:
    • https:// the s stands for "secure" and it is essential to give links to addresses with this prefix correctly inside <a href="">; and
    • mailto: the reader's computer should open an email system and prepare to send a message to the address following the mailto:.
  • www.londonfreelance.org the unique name of the computer it lives on;
  • /fl/ what directory or folder it's in on that computer;
  • style the name of the file;
  • .html an indicator of the type of the file. HTML is Hyper-Text Markup Language, which is to say a Web page. Other possibilities for this "filename extension" include:
    • .htm the same as .html
    • .php a web page, but generated from a database using PHP script.
    • .jpg or .jpeg or .gif a direct reference to a picture
    • .txt plain text
    • .doc or .docx almost certainly a Microsoft Word document
    • .pdf an Adobe Acrobat™ file.

A URL may have two further components:

  • A so-called "anchor" reference starting with # thus: http://www.londonfreelance.org/fl/style.html#URLs - which is an instruction to the reader's computer to go to a named place in the document. Here the place is named "URLs" and it is defined in this document by <a name="URLs"></a>. Note that, unlike the rest of the URL, this is case-sensitive. Thus neither #URLS nor #urls will have any useful effect.
  • A so-called "query" starting with ? thus: http://www.londonfreelance.org/fl/style.html?d=2022_08.
    • The intended use of these is to do lookups, as in the address www.londonfreelance.org/feesguide/index.php?section=Photography
    • Often, though, queries are used to indicate how the reader reached the page, as in the Freelance indexes. This can also be for the purposes of tracking of visits to a page, as in www.example.edu/staff/Miggins ?source=A6gQyUr906
    • When publishing a web address it's always worth cutting off the query string - from and including the ? - to see whether it still works when simplified like that. Queries on the ends of Freelance article addresses should always be chopped.
    • In mailto: links the query can be used to pass data to the email system - for example mailto:miggins@example.edu?Subject=Example

    We look forward to your feedback.

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