Writing Playbook

EDITORIAL STYLE GUIDE
Numbers
Figures
Currency
Dates
Time
Formatting
Bullets
Dashes
Double spacing
Italics / bold / underlining
Language
Abreviations
Capitalisation
Punctuation
Hyphenation
Pronouns
Other
Index
TONE OF VOICE
Principles
Confident
Thoughtful
Natural
Proofreading
Before and after examples
Writing for impact

Capitalisation

Headings

We use sentence case for headings (mirroring the Financial Times, because it’s a good reference point for our business). This is when you capitalise the first letter and then only proper nouns.

CORRECT
Make critical decisions with confidence

Never use a capital letter after a colon – this is US English.

Proper nouns

Before we start:

· A noun = a thing

· A proper noun = a name of a thing, its title

Here are a few examples:

NOUN
PROPER NOUN
The queen bee
Queen Elizabeth II
Government departments
Department for Education

We use title case for proper nouns, as you would your own name. In title case, joining words such as ‘of’, ‘or’, ‘but’ should always be lower case.

Our campaigns, projects, strategy strap lines and events are all proper nouns – they are names of things. So are committees and government titles.

When we talk about our own Board, we capitalise it because it’s referring to the name of the team. We also capitalise Group when referring to our organisation, as it’s a shortened version of RSM UK Group LLP.

We use lower case for general nouns. For example, we would use lower case when writing about ‘councils across the country’ but upper case when writing about ‘Reading Borough Council’.

COMMON NOUN (not capitalised)
PROPER NOUN (capitalised)
firm or the firm
Employment Matters
business or the business
RSM Week
statutory audit
The Bank of England
Prime Minister
Group
RSM Board
Corporation Tax Act 2009

Job titles

We treat our job titles as proper nouns, so we capitalise them. That includes the seniority level in the title. But when we’re referring to a seniority level generally, we don’t capitalise it.

CORRECT
INCORRECT
Head of Risk
Audit director
Audit Partner
Our Managers/our Directors/ our Partners
Our partners

Writing Playbook