House style guidelines

In general, punctuation should be used to clarify the meaning of text. Too much can interrupt the reader’s flow; too little or the wrong kind can cause ambiguity.

Find information here on conventions for using dashes and hyphens, quotation marks and spaces.

Dashes and Hyphens

As the en rule (–) is not supported by all web fonts, use a hyphen in the following situations (where an en-dash would be used in printed publications):

• to stand in for ‘and’ or ‘to’; for example, England-Scotland match (equal weight relation); pp10-20 and 5-14 (ranges of numbers)

• in sub-lists

• as parenthetical dashes, for example ‘He stood up - believe it or not - and started to sing a song.’

Hyphenate periods of time as follows:

• adjective: mid-19th-century

• adjective: late 19th-century

• noun: mid-19th century

• noun: late 19th century.

Hyphenate compound adjectives: long-term aims, up-to-date. For example: ‘these up-to-date guidelines incorporate some changes’ but ‘these guidelines are up to date’. 

Do not hyphenate: website, headteacher, homework, schoolwork, coursework, case study.

Quotations

• Use single quotation marks.

• Commas and full stops should be placed outside quotation marks, unless the quoted matter forms a complete sentence in itself (Example 1: It is another case of ‘out of the frying pan into the fire’. Example 2: She said, ‘It is another case of out of the frying pan into the fire.’).

• Use a spaced ellipsis to indicate words omitted within a sentence (Because children learn through all of their experiences ... the curriculum needs to recognise and complement the contributions that these experiences can make.).

Spaces

Use a single space after a full stop to separate sentences.