Public Affairs Office
Style Guide
Reed's public affairs office works with staff and faculty members on publication projects in copy development, editing, and production. We copyedit handbooks, brochures, and other publications aimed at either internal or external audiences to help produce a clear and readable publication (although our primary focus is on external audiences). If your publication will be sent outside the college, we will work with you on the production process; see more on that in the "copy submission and formatting" section.
With so many offices communicating to both internal and external audiences, consistency throughout all these publications becomes increasingly important. The usage preferences that we have established are referred to as style.For the most part our basic style reference is the latest edition of the Chicago Manual of Style; a copy is available for reference in Eliot 212. We do choose to deviate from Chicago in some instances, given in the following pages.
As for capitalization: in general, our style is a lowercase, "down" style, which has proven to be easier on the reader (see Dynamics in Document Design by Karen Schriver, and Type & Layout, by Colin Wheildon).
This guide is not meant to include all usage and grammar issues, but the following are notes on some style issues we frequently encounter.