A style guide for those pitching articles to the SBP

As editor of Computers In Business, I'm often pitched articles from company heads, consultants and freelancers.

Sometimes, the topic is relevant. Sometimes it isn't. But whoever is writing the article can give themselves an instant boost by knowing and following the 'style' rules that we have. (A newspaper's 'style guide' is the particular collection of rules that it employs in the way it presents its articles. For example, whereas the Irish Times gives men a title ('Mr'), the Sunday Business Post does not.)

So for anyone thinking of pitching a piece to Computers In Business, here are a few simple style rules to follow.

1. Keep sentences short
No sentence should be more than 25 words long, save in exceptional circumstances. Or in cases of a completely necessary quotation that cannot be truncated. Sentences over 25 words are unwieldy and difficult to read. As such, they are liable to be cut from the piece.

2. Banned phrases
There are many ‘descriptive’ or ‘prosaic’ terms that are unsuitable to certain business articles. These include the addition of terms such as "of course", "essentially", "in a sense" and "in fact". These are flowery terms that detract from the clarity of the article, so please avoid them.

3. Short-cuts not to be used
Don't use "etc" "eg" "ie". Just use a full stop and start the next sentence with "For example".

4. Quotes
Keep quotes to a maximum of three or four lines. When returning to a quoted speaker, identify who the speaker is again. Do not assume the reader remembers who you are quoting.

5. Abbreviations and acronyms: the difference
-- Do not use little-known abbreviations or acronyms without spelling them out first
-- If an abbreviation can be pronounced as a word (eg Vat), it is an acronym and takes small letters after a capital letter. If it can’t be pronounced as a word (eg PRSI), it is an abbreviation and takes all capitals.

6. The scourge of American spellings
An organisation cannot be an organization. So please do not submit words using US spellings, particularly those that substitute ‘z’ for ‘s’. Please adjust spell-checking software to reflect this.

Common mistakes and rules
1. All job descriptions are lower case (managing director, chief executive, etc), except for Taoiseach, Tanaiste
2. It should always be 'the government', not 'government' (except in headlines)
3. The sentences, phrases and clauses coming after colons should begin with a lower case letter.
4. Companies are always singular. Even if the company is called Taylor Brothers or Curran & Sons, it is still treated as a singular noun. (There are exceptions, but this is the general rule.)
5. The state and the government are both lower case.
6. Do not use exclamation marks or "…"
7. When quoting someone, always use the past tense. Always use "said". Never use "commented", "added", "exclaimed", "pointed out" or anything else. Always use "said".

Comments

[Barneyausten]

Adrian - how handy is this! Thanks for sharing this. It will make the process of shaping an article far easier for those of us who have never done it before (and indeed some who possibly have!).

[Adrian]

No worries Barney. Might as well have it out there; might streamline the whole process a little.

[Jason Walsh]

All good except:

"These include the addition of terms such as "of course", "essentially", "in a sense" and "in fact".

Oh, the guilt, the red-faced shame. I'm always at that for some reason.

[Barry Alistair]

Good guide points Adrian, and I'm sure as an organisation that probably get's hundreds of Irish based pieces per week, very relevent too.

In our experience however, I don't think Irish tech business are encouraged any where near enough to share their news.

We http://IrishDev.com too have 'house style' but are happy to apply this ourselves if the submission is accepted.

[Fred]

Good post Adrian. This is great for us and maybe a friendly reminder to all the PR companies ;)
Cheers
Fred

[Simon Palmer]

Thanks Adrian, this is the sort of thing I am trying to hammer home to my IT clients. It seems the IT sector is particularly bad at this because of the US spellings and all the jargon it seems to be infected with. It's so important to talk in lay terms. One point I beg to differ on is that acronym's do not always have to be in lower case, even where they form a word. This is possibly just the SBP's house style, but I was always taught that acronyms of five letters or less are uppercase (NATO, NASA) and more than five letters are lower case e.g. Benelux. Funnily enough I think the exception to the rule is IT terms, which if memory serves me correctly includes FORTRAN. I think this was in an Government style guide I was given in the Britain, but of course it could be different over here.
P.S. love the dog

[Adrian Weckler]

Simon,

You're right -- it is a particular house style.

And there are exceptions. I'm actually not 100 per cent sure about Nasa or Nato (that's what we employ subs for, the real wordsmiths!). But these rules are correct in 95 per cent of situations.

The worst ones are job titles and long, flowery sentences. It's ALWAYS better to err on the side of brevity, even if you think it 'sounds unimpressive'.

It's the same rationale for avoiding cliches and hackneyed phrases. But there's just no point in trying to make that case strongly. There is no chance that anyone will comply. The Irish business person is hard-wired to cliche.

[Adam]

Excellent resource - thanks for posting it.

As Jason said above, a few red-faced moments as I read through it and spotted one or two no-nos I'm guilty of writing.

It's a shame Irish publications in general don't make this kind of thing available on their websites - or easily accessible at request.

Surely they'd lose nothing and possibly gain a lot.

[A D Splice]

This is a house style and you can look up the various other ones on the web (the Guardian, the Economist, and others, including Irish-based organisations have their own "Style Guides").

However, adopting a tailored house style in a press releases and article doesn't scale. What are you going to do? Rewrite your piece for each submission according to the rules for each?

Writing clearly in English should be sufficient for everyone.

The obvious conclusion that anyone reading this will draw, of course, now has the clearcut evidence that the "technology" correspondents of Irish newspapers just rehash whatever PR propaganda they're sent or pick up from Mickey Mouse spinmeisters with iPhones (sorry Social Media 'Gurus'), Blogs, Twitter, RSS, RWW, Mashable, the Government, or whatever. They now can't even be arsed to sub-edit (the source of these guidelines) submissions before respewing them out! God help us that they might be able to critically analyse the content rather than the form of it.

Perhaps, this is not surprising, of course, given these are not technology correspondents anyway - just business journalists. Not one of these people have a single technology patent, heavyweight qualification (sorry undergrad don't count) in the area, academic paper worth it's salt published, presented at any strategic conference on the matter, or is even capable of getting further than "Hello, World" in a simple exercise for Java.

You're completely wrong about "i.e." and "etc.," by the way, and the distinctions betweeen acronyms and abbreviations isn't that clear cut. Far better would have been to tell people how to deal with currencies or dates or even which file formats or encoding to use in their submissions.

[Cian]

Like Adam and Jason, I'm also guilty of a few mistake (As well as some unforgeable other errors).

Re acronyms: An entry in The Irish Times' style guide, in part, reads: "if the letters are pronounced as a word, write in ulc (Dart, Cab, Eta, Siptu)...". The Guardian and at least a few other papers use the same rule.

Much of what is style across newspapers goes against the grain with what people think or have been told is correct.

@ A D Splice -- I would argue that you're completely wrong. House style is like house rules. The newspaper sets what is right or wrong. Any writer can have their own ideas, but while you're writing for them (or, in other words, in their house) you play by their rules.

[Elizabeth Birdthistle]

Adrian

A blast from the past! I have enjoyed and learnt from your advice, and having just recieved my NUJ card hope to put same to good use.
Regards

Elizabeth Birdthistle

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