Writing Style Primer
CTLI’s writing style is friendly, straightforward, informative, and accessible. This page provides tips on how to achieve this style.
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Plain language
Plain language
- increases the likelihood that readers will find and use the content
- makes your content more accessible to English language learners and readers with disabilities
- saves time later by reducing the number of follow-up inquiries by readers
The U.S. government’s Plain Language Action and Information Network (plainlanguage.gov) defines plain language as “communication your audience can understand the first time they read or hear it.” This definition is useful in that it focuses on results rather than on a specific set of rules to follow.
How to incorporate plain language into your writing
Here are some of the simple writing habits that reflect plain language principles:
- Use short sentences and paragraphs
- Enables scanning and helps to divide information visually.
- It also makes your message more accessible to English language learners and readers with disabilities.
- Use simple words
- Sometimes jargon is necessary, but whenever possible use words that most people understand and would use in everyday conversation.
- Avoid idioms and culturally-specific expressions
- English language learners might find it difficult to translate such phrases.
- Get to the point
- Make it easier for readers to get information—anything that hinders this goal should be eliminated.
Tone
Our tone is professional, but informal. Write as if you’re talking to readers in person using an informative, conversational tone.
Tips on how to do this:
- Address readers directly by using the second-person pronouns you, your, etc.
- Avoid bureaucratic and overly promotional language
- Write informally, which makes you sound like a real person and facilitates an emotional connection with your readers
Style
Along with keeping your writing style simple and straightforward, style describes conventions related to grammar, punctuation, capitalization, numbers, spelling, and so on. For more on these specifics, see our Editing and Style Guide.
Let’s look at some style tips.
Contractions
- Use contractions in your writing—this more closely resembles the way you and your readers speak in everyday conversation and makes your writing easier to understand
- Example: Write you’ll instead of you will
Headings and subheadings
- Same capitalization style applied to each heading—in general, apply headline-style capitalization to article or page titles and sentence-style capitalization to headings and subheadings
- Use headings that are informative and descriptive (rather than clever or funny) so readers can find what they’re looking for
Italics
- Do not use for words to be defined; use boldface text instead
- Use for the titles of books, newspapers, journals, movies, and artworks such as operas and paintings
Links
- Where possible, integrate links into text to help orient readers (tell them where they’re going)
- Instead of “click here for more information,” write “visit our CTLI Teaching Toolkit to learn more.”
- Replace long URLs with page or article titles to improve accessibility for screen reader users
Lists
- List items should be numbered when they represent steps in a process or when numbering indicates a hierarchy
- If bulleted list items are complete sentences, punctuate them normally
- If list items are not complete sentences, do not use capital letters or closing punctuation
Punctuation
- Use the series (Oxford) comma
- Place periods and commas inside quotation marks
- Use closed em and en dashes
Spelling
- Use Canadian spelling
- “Our” word endings (ex: behaviour, colour, neighbour)
- Other example words: centre, grey, organize
