Website Text Editing/A&S Style Guide

Content style: Use AP Style Guidelines

AP Stylebook website

Advisor not adviser 

Book titles

Per Chronicle style, put book titles in quotation marks, not italics. 

Bullet style

  • Cap the first word of each bulleted item
  • No semicolons or commas at the end of lines
  • Periods at end of bullets only if they’re complete sentences

College name

  • Cornell University College of Arts & Sciences
  • College of Arts & Sciences
  • Arts & Sciences
  • A&S
  • The College
  • (Never AS or College of A&S) 

Contact information:

Name in bold
Title
Room and building
(If needed: Cornell University
Ithaca, N.Y. 14853)
Phone 
Email
If only using email then offset by commas, ex.: Kathy Hovis, kah53@cornell.edu

Department names:

Should be lowercase when they come before the word department, capitalized when Department is first:

  • Department of Classics
  • classics department

Only capitalize proper names in a department name when name comes first:

  • East Asian studies program
  • English department
  • history department

Engaged Cornell:

Here are general guidelines about EC wording:

  • Use specific grant names, when possible. When grant names are used, there’s no need to include “Engaged Cornell” or “Office of Engagement Initiatives.”

  • When you do need to use a unit name, use “Office of Engagement Initiatives.” This is the unit that gives grants and awards, holds workshops, sponsors events, etc.

  • “Engaged Cornell” is an ethos, a philosophy, a spirit. It can’t do things like make grants. 

GPA not G.P.A.

Letter grades:

Should be in quotations. Ex: A student may not earn more than one “B” in a course to be considered for Phi Beta Kappa.

M.A. not MA

Ph.D. not PhD

Preprofessional not Pre Professional or Pre-Professional

Pre-law not prelaw or pre law

Telephone numbers

  • 607-255-9646 
  • Always include area codes.

Titles:

Professor’s titles are in caps only if they appear before their name or if they have an endowed professorship. If they appear after, use lowercase, i.e.:

  • Amy Villarejo, professor of performing & media arts
  • Sturt Manning, Goldwin Smith Professor of Classical Archaeology

The first title (or department, if no faculty are cited) should include “in the College of Arts & Sciences”; after that, it should include “(A&S).” So, for example:

  • First occurrence of an A&S professor: Michael Goldstein, associate professor of psychology in the College of Arts and Sciences
  • Second occurrence: Jeffrey Palmer, assistant professor of performing and media arts (A&S)

Underlines: Do not underline unless required by a specific field styleguide. Never underline just to "make something stand out." It is an accessibility issue.

Article Input

Headline

  • Do not use the ampersand or other special characters in headlines. Spell out “Arts and Sciences”; do not abbreviate as “AS.”
  • Capitalize only the first word and any proper nouns in a headline

Byline

  • Don’t include “by,” it shows up automatically
  • For all stories, use reporter’s name; if no name listed leave black
  • When posting press releases without a byline, use “Staff”

Date:

The date the article was first published, not the date of entering on the site.

Summary:

This is the teaser text that will display in newsletters and on homepages etc. Keep this short but don’t repeat the headline. The goal is to inspire the reader to click on the link to read the whole article, so try to find the “hook” that will best engage the reader’s interest.

Media Outlet:

For stories written by any member of the A&S communications team or student worker, the media outlet should always be A&S Communications (not “AS”). If it appears in the Chronicle as well, make a note at the bottom of the article. 

For articles from AA&D, the media outlet should be listed as “Cornell Alumni Affairs and Development”

Copyrighted articles

  • Write one or two paragraphs offering context for the story (mentioning the department, faculty member or student quoted in the piece and how it relates to our mission or strategic objectives in teaching, research, collaboration, interdisciplinary approaches, public engagement, etc.), then include  “Read the entire article in [media outlet name].” with “here” as the link. 
  • Example: Read the story in The New York Times. Listen to the interview on NPR's "Science Friday." 
  • Any copied text from the original article should be put in quotes. Do not quote more than  three sentences – but you can paraphrase and summarize as much as is necessary to make the quote work..
  • Here is an example of how to post an op-ed:

By: Barry Strauss,  Wall Street Journal

March 21, 2016

Barry Strauss, professor of history and classics, chair of history and author of “The Death of Caesar: The Story of History’s Most Famous Assassination,” offers lessons on leadership drawn from Julius Caesar's life -- and what not to do when running a company -- in an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal.

Strauss says that Julius Caesar’s assassination on the Ides of March is one of history’s most teachable moments, the result of an epic failure of leadership. 

"After winning a civil war, Caesar became Rome’s dictator and had the chance to reshape the empire’s politics,” he writes. ”Instead, he alienated friend and foe by his high-handed ways while dismissing his bodyguard in a foolish attempt to seem approachable. He was approached—with daggers."

Read the story in The Wall Street Journal.

Cornell Chronicle stories NOT bylined by A&S staff or students

  • Media source should be noted as Cornell Chronicle

  • Full text of the article is acceptable to post

  • Always include a link back to the originating source at the end of the story:

  • Never change Chronicle headlines
  • Do not rewrite Chronicle articles, but you can post just an excerpt
    • EXAMPLE:

FROM:

Four elected to National Academy of Sciences

By Krishna Ramanujan, Cornell Chronicle

An agricultural economist, a theoretical physicist, a plant biologist and a physiologist at Cormell have each been elected to the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), the academy announced May 3.

The newly elected members include Chris Barrett, the Stephen B. and Janice G. Ashley Professor in the Charles H. Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management in the Cornell SC Johnson College of Business; Peter Lepage, the Tisch Family Distinguished University Professor in the Department of Physics in the College of Arts and Sciences; Gregory Martin, the Boyce Schulze Downey Professor at the Boyce Thompson Institute for Plant Research and a professor in the School of Integrative Plant Science Plant Pathology and Plant-Microbe Biology Section in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences; and Olga Boudker, professor of physiology and biophysics at Weill Cornell Medicine.

The four Cornellians are among 120 members and 30 international members who were elected in recognition of their distinguished and continuing achievements in original research. With the newest elections, there are now 2,512 active members and 517 international NAS members. Seventy Cornellians have now been elected to the academy since inaugural elections in 1863.

Barrett, who holds joint appointments in the departments of Economics and Global Development and in the Cornell Jeb E. Brooks School of Public Policy, aims to apply his teaching, outreach and research toward improving the well-being of the world’s poor in areas of health, nutrition, poverty, disaster risk management and natural resources management. His research is mainly in development and agricultural microeconomics, with strong links to environmental and resource economics. His areas of focus include the dynamics of poverty, food security and well-being; individual, household and community resilience and effective risk management; and agri-food value chains and complex food systems.

Lepage explores the world of quantum physics, where he develops numerical simulation techniques that help explain quantum chromodynamics – the fundamental theory of quarks and gluons that describes the internal structure of protons, neutrons and other subnuclear particles. He is also interested in high-precision atomic physics, heavy-quark physics, nuclear physics and physics pedagogy.

Read the story in the Cornell Chronicle

TO:

Four elected to National Academy of Sciences

By Krishna Ramanujan, Cornell Chronicle

An agricultural economist, a theoretical physicist, a plant biologist and a physiologist at Cornell have each been elected to the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), the academy announced May 3.

The newly elected members include  Peter Lepage, the Tisch Family Distinguished University Professor in the Department of Physics in the College of Arts and Sciences.

The four Cornellians are among 120 members and 30 international members who were elected in recognition of their distinguished and continuing achievements in original research. With the newest elections, there are now 2,512 active members and 517 international NAS members. Seventy Cornellians have now been elected to the academy since inaugural elections in 1863.

Lepage explores the world of quantum physics, where he develops numerical simulation techniques that help explain quantum chromodynamics – the fundamental theory of quarks and gluons that describes the internal structure of protons, neutrons and other subnuclear particles. He is also interested in high-precision atomic physics, heavy-quark physics, nuclear physics and physics pedagogy.

Read the full story in the Cornell Chronicle

Captions:

Use italics

Bio at end of story:

Normal italics.

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