House Style Guide

To ensure consistency and quality, our editors will review your EBOSSNOW article and reserve the right to make changes to it. If you want to avoid your article undergoing extensive editing, we recommend familiarising yourself with the following common issues with articles in our House Style Guide:

Write in the third person

EBOSSNOW articles are advertorials and as such need to sound objective. Write your articles in the third person — i.e. not using personal terms like 'our' and 'we'. Instead of writing 'We supply our customers with X,' write 'Company Y supplies its customers with X'.

Don't replicate articles you already have online

Don’t use the exact same marketing text for EBOSSNOW and other platforms you may use. Google recognises this as duplicated content and it may result in a poorer search engine ranking result for your article. If content has already been published online elsewhere, our editorial team will ask you to rewrite the article. 

No copyrights©, registration® signs and trademarks™

Like most publications, we remove these from brand names and 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.

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.

Avoid marketing speak

Architects prefer to read fact-based, accurate descriptions of products and their uses so that they can make well informed decisions. Avoid using flowery, decorative language and company slogans. Clear, concise language is best.

Other things to avoid

• Don't make direct comparisons to competitor's products or defamatory comments — there are usually legal ramifications!
• Don't use low-resolution images. Architects are visual people so a poor image will discourage them from reading your article.

Other semantic house styles

• All dashes to be em dashes e.g. '—' not hyphens '-' (OSX shortcut is pressing opt + shift + - on your keyboard).
• All captions finish with a period.
• 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.
• Don't frame words in "quotation marks" unless they are quotations.