Writing policies and style guide

This applies to medical and non-medical articles published on our websites.

We are very open in the topics we will consider, but the format of our articles must follow strict requirements:

Prose

• 100% original prose (⚠️ writers that break this rule will be immediately removed from our team)
• Each section should link to authoritative sources of additional information
• Each link includes a description
• Read our linking policy (⚠️ writers that break the linking policy may be immediately removed from our team)
• 100% correct spelling and grammar
• Prose should be broken into paragraphs, lists, and callouts and should use bold for important text
• Recommend an image for your article
• Use additional images in the article if it is helpful

This is how we evaluate our writing:

https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/guidelines.raterhub.com/en//searchqualityevaluatorguidelines.pdf

Capitalization, word choice, headings

We require sentence case everywhere. Even in titles and headings. There are limited exceptions to this rule, and each are detailed in this section.

Proper nouns

• Proper nouns, like Dick Tracy, are in title case. You can tell something is a proper noun by seeing its Wikipedia article. Spoiler: personal protective equipment is not a proper noun, but Good Samaritan is.

Heading word choice

• The heading structure (h1/h2/h3) for each page should support the inbound search keywords are targeting for that page. For example:
  • ❌ h1: Free hands-on skill testing
  • ✅ h1: Online ACLS certification

Typesetting

Punctuation

• Use n-dash without spacing for ranges. Example: 10am–2pm.
• Phone numbers in the US are formatted like +1 212-555-1212. Or if the audience is absolutely certain to be in the US, you can use 212-555-1212.

Initialisms (e.g. “ACLS”) and abbreviations (e.g. “dept.”)

• For our courses, every initialism must be defined on first use. Use parenthetical offset because these will show when if/when course materials are printed. For example:

  My car is packed so I drive in the HOV (high occupancy vehicle) lane. Driving in the HOV saves money because it can avoid fees on toll roads.

• For our online articles, use your judgement as to whether a parethentical offset is necessary. But every single time, do be sure to use an abbreviation tag. In HTML this is:

  <abbr title="high occupancy vehicle">HOV</abbr>
  

• When spelling out the words of an initialism, still use sentence case. Use “cardiopulmonary resuscitation”, because that is not a proper noun.

HTML / Jekyll code style

Our tech team and copyeditors can find additional notes in the instructions folder in our GitHub project.