Style guide

When trying to pinpoint our style here at the RVANews, we realized we are too faceted to subscribe to one particular method. So for now, we’re just going to address the things that have been inconsistent and pick which way to go. Please note that this is a living document. Its standards will ebb and flow with the waters that are the Internets.

Feature/post titles

We’re going with sentence case on this one. It’s so easy, guys. Pretend that your title is a sentence and capitalize it as such (first letter of the first word, proper nouns, and so forth).

Note: capitalization rules may be broken for comedic effect, as in “Crazy preacher rants about The End Times” or whatever.

Another note: No punctuation at the end of titles.

Commas

RVANews fully supports use of the serial comma. As this is the 21st century and paper is lame, we don’t have to worry about fitting characters within a specific space (which is where this no serial comma mess came about).

So instead of this…

I like apples, oranges and bananas.

You do this…

I like apples, oranges, and bananas.

Singular possessive nouns ending in -s

Please, please, please include the apostrophe -s when indicating something belongs to a singular noun ending in -s. As in “This is Ross’s Internet empire.” Not “This is Ross’ Internet empire.”

Numbers

Numbers zero through nine are written as actual words. Anything above nine should be written as a numeral.

And some nitpicks

• email, not e-mail

• web, not Web

• dates written out as month (no abbreviations), day, year

• phone numbers broken up with dots: 123.456.7890

• time written as 12.00am, and so forth