House Style Guide

To ensure consistency and quality, our editor will review your Detailed blog post, and may make changes. If you want to avoid your article undergoing extensive editing, we recommend familiarising yourself with the following common issues with blog posts in our House Style Guide.

Write in the first-person

Unlike EBOSSNOW articles, Detailed blog posts are fronted by an individual personality. Write your articles in the first person — i.e. "I've found that a common problem designers face is..."

Don't use unqualified superlative statements

Any sentence that says a company/product is "the best", "the only", "the superior" or "the leading" is unqualified and not-helpful to architects wanting honest, evidence-based information on a product's performance. We reword these to a neutral statement or remove them entirely.

Don't make comparisons to competitor's products

The focus of blog posts should be of your knowledge and expertise within the category. Don't make any direct or indirect comparisons to competitor's products or defamatory comments — there are usually legal ramifications! If you have a blog post where comparison of product types is included, please ensure that the post is balanced (focussing on the benefits and disadvantages of each with no bias) and send a copy to our editor prior to submitting so that she can determine whether it is acceptable. 

Don't replicate content you already have online

Don’t use the exact same marketing text for Detailed posts and other platforms you may use online. Google recognises this as duplicated content and it may result in a poorer search engine ranking result for your post.

No Copyrights ©, Registration ® Signs and Trademarks ™

Like most publications we remove these from brand names, product names as they impair readability and give the article a cold, legal feel.

Avoid uppercase in proper nouns unless an acronym

We are reluctant to publish uppercase in brand and product names unless the name is an acronym, as uppercase is demonstrated to be difficult to read, causing rivers in text and comes across as 'yelling'.  We review each request for uppercase based on whether the word is an acronym or there is demonstrated consistency across the web in how the company presents the brand.

Other semantic house styles

• All dashes to be em dashes e.g. '—' not hyphens '-' (OSX shortcut is pressing opt + shift + - on your keyboard)
• If the noun is plural and ends in -s, add only an apostrophe
• Hyphenate compound adjectives only if preceding a noun, e.g. either 'heat-resistant benchtop', or 'the benchtop is heat resistant'
• Facade, not façade
• Italics only used when referring to published sources e.g. The NZ Herald
• Don’t use dashes in titles, always use colons
• Hyperlinks that form a full sentence have the end period omitted