Ten online style points
1. Sentence-case headings
For example: Why only one human race? (not Why Only One Human Race?). If your heading includes the title of, say, a book or a film with an upper-cased title, then write it like this: Kirsten Alexander reviews The Omega Force by Rick Moody. No italics in headings, use a colon to separate headings and sub-headings, and no full stop at the end.
2. No ampersands (&) unless part of a company name or trademark (Standard & Poor's). For general use always spell out 'and'.
3. No hyphens used as dashes
A hyphen (-) should not be used instead of an em dash. (—) (see more on dashes)
4. No ALL-CAPS unless you want to appear to be shouting.
5. Minimal capitalisation in text body
We limit initial caps (apart from those marking the beginning of a sentence) to proper nouns—that is, nouns naming a particular person or thing. So we'd write 'Mark Scott, the ABC's managing director…' or 'John Smith, adjunct professor at ANU…'
No caps for 'premier', 'prime minister', 'president', 'executive producer', 'artistic director', 'curator', and so on, because these are all common nouns. When used as a form of address, a common noun is capped: President Obama, Queen Elizabeth, Pope Benedict, Governor Bartlett; but 'Australia's prime minister, Julia Gillard, is visiting New York…' or collectively, 'Previous popes have held similar views…' are all lower case.
6. Abbreviations, acronyms
No full stops after or between abbreviations and acronyms. No full stops after or between initials in people's names.
Dr, Mr, WA, NSW, etc, eg, km, and so on (unless at the end of a sentence). And it's TS Eliot, kd lang, George W Bush.
7. Titles of books, films, etc
Italicise titles of books, newspapers and magazines, films, plays, operas, works of art, performances, TV and radio programs etc. Find more details here
8. Titles of songs, poems, etc
Single inverted commas for titles of songs, short stories, shorter poems, articles or chapters. Names of bands, groups, organisations, festivals etc are written in plain type with no italics or inverted commas.
9. Quotations, speech
Our house style is for single inverted commas for everything except quotes within quotes, which take double inverted commas. For example:
He said, 'My father always told me, "Come out fighting," and I've never forgotten it.'
10. Numbers and dates
Spell out numbers from one to ten, then use numerals. Spell out all numbers at start of sentence (Forty-eight people were injured...) For thousands and millions etc: 3,000, 500,000, 2 million, 8 billion, etc.
Date format: 9 November 2005.
