Most of our communication is written, so clear writing makes a huge difference in the effectiveness of our team. Our style is professional but friendly and light.
Especially if you are involved in We recommend reading Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style. Even if you have before, it’s a great resource to go back to every few years.
If grammar and punctuation are not your strong suit, we encourage you to use Grammarly or ChatGPT to check your writing. This is a great way to make your communication clearer and more professional.
For ChatGPT here is an easy sample prompt you can use:
Act like a copyeditor and edit this manuscript according to the Chicago Manual of Style. Focus on punctuation, grammar, syntax, typos, capitalization, formatting and consistency.We have a few other random preferences, especially as pertaining to industry topics.
- Important: Use curly quotes for any public-facing communication. Learn the keyboard shortcuts so you can type them faster, or use keyboard helpers.
- Punctation marks may not go inside quotes when using a standalone term. It’s correct if someone says “this is the right way.” But it’s also fine in our view, if you are quoting a term, to do things the “Wrong Way”. However, it may make even more sense for the term to be italics instead of quotations when in doubt about how to deal with the Wrong Way.
- These words are one word. When used as a proper noun, they should be capitalized. However, they will most often be used as an adjective and should thus follow sentence case:
- frontend
- backend
- The user has a “login” which they use to “log in” to a site. They do not have a “log in” that they use to “log into” a site. You “hack into” a site, you don’t “hack in to” a site.
- Punctuation and Lists: If a list item contains one sentence only, it does not need a trailing period. If it has more than one sentence, both sentences should have periods.