Punctuation
Quotation marks and apostrophes
Only use double quotation marks when directly quoting someone. Use single quotes to add clarity when showing that some words are examples and sparingly to highlight colloquial phrases, such as ‘bite the bullet’. In this case, use quote marks only on the first appearance of the phrase.
Ampersands
Use the word and rather than an ampersand (&) unless it’s a company’s name as it appears on the Companies House register. Even if an ampersand is used in an RSM email signature, we should not use it in copy.
Exclamation marks
Use sparingly.
Serial comma
We avoid the serial comma unless it’s needed for clarity.
Also called the Oxford or Harvard comma, this is when you add a comma before the penultimate entry in a list. It looks like this ‘tax, assurance, and consultancy’ – and we avoid this.
We only use the serial comma to add clarity. For example: ‘Join our webinars on tax updates, recruitment, and preparing for audits to save time’. Without the serial comma, it could suggest that ‘saving time’ applies to all three topics.