These guidelines will help to create consistent high quality, brand-compliant content. It excludes guidance on writing style.
District 61 Date and Time Standard. It applies to both English and French.
Check:
- spelling
- terminology
- punctuation
- In English, particularly on the Web, no need for punctuation, like semicolons, at the end of bullets. The bullet provide the punctuation. If all the bullets in a list are full sentences, they can end with a period.
- In French, bullets end with <space><semicolon> ” ;” (2021-01-31: This is under review by the Translation Committee)
- We use the serial comma, or Oxford comma, in comma-separated lists (see Termium 7.15 Comma)
- Between sentences, only one space is required, not two. (2021-01-31: This is under review by the Translation Committee)
- https://www.btb.termiumplus.gc.ca/tcdnstyl-chap?lang=eng&lettr=chapsect17&info0=17
- https://www.ultius.com/glossary/grammar/punctuation/french-quotation-mark.html
- grammar
- Paragraphs. For an unknown reason, for pasting into the web site posts, between paragraphs, we need an extra, empty paragraph.
- It seems that when people translate English double quotation marks to French, they somehow convert them to two apostrophes or single quotation marks instead of guillements « (Alt+174) and » (Alt+175), respectively. I do not know how this happens, but I keep receiving text like this. Please check for that.
- Hyperlinks. For hyperlinks if there is an available French link, include it. The hyperlink that is provided will be used.
- Graphics. We use a plugin to automatically reduce uploaded graphics to maximum 1024 x 1024. For newsletter and event posts, the main image is the featured image. The optimum aspect ratio is 1200 x 628