Capitalisation

Our style generally is to minimise the use of capital letters. Capitalising the first word of sentences only, and proper nouns.

As of March 2024, our CSS styling on the main website will no longer adjust heading tags to all uppercase., therefore it is very important that you follow the capitalisation guidance on this page to ensure consistent formatting across all content.

Don't capitalise the words undergraduate, postgraduate, foundation year, open days, etc, in general sentences, for example:

• View our foundation year courses
• Explore our undergraduate courses A-Z
• We hold a number of open days during the year
• Offer holder days are held throughout the year
• Expand our horizons when you study abroad

When referring to the Professional Services, capitalise (e.g. Strategic Communications and Brand).

When we’re referring to Keele specifically, the word University should be capitalised.

When referring to open days in general they should be written in lower case, but when referring to a specific Open Day the two words should be capitalised, e.g. 'Find out more about our open days' / 'Come along to our Open Day on August 1st'.

'Web' should not be capitalised (e.g., 'when using the web')

Course titles

Course titles should be capitalised (e.g. BSc Forensic Science), but subjects shouldn't be capitalised in other contexts (e.g. Keele has been teaching psychology since...).

Master's and Bachelor's are capitalised when referring to a specific degree course (e.g. Our Master's in Computing) and lower-case for general references (our master's degrees). They both always have a possessive apostrophe (') before the s.

When referring to a specific course type, use capitals (eg Undergraduate Degree in Management), but use lowercase when non-specific (eg 'our range of certificates of higher education').

Don't use full stops in degree acronyms (eg BA, not B.A.).

Staff titles

Please ensure that we always prefix names with professional titles in any of our communications e.g. 'Dr Sarah Smith writes for', 'Professor Sarah Smith comments on', etc.

We do not use academic ranks in the section names for staff profiles. When creating a new section for a staff member, please use their first and last name in that order as that forms their URL. However, within the staff profile itself the academic rank need to be used in the following manner:

• Dr without the full stop at the end.
• Professor needs to be written in full, Prof is not an acceptable abbreviation for the key information about staff member, however it may be used in details, such as Biography or Teaching tabs for example. Do not use full stop after Prof please.

Do not use Mr/Mrs/Miss etc. titles, only use professional titles where applicable as specified above:

• Mrs Mary Smith should be just Mary Smith.

One last thing

Don't use 'http://www' when writing web addresses (e.g. www.keele.ac.uk), unless the address won't work without this prefix when typed into a browser.