This resource is intended for all Travis County staff and provides guidelines and best practices for generating written content. It covers tone, grammar, punctuation, formatting, and more.
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Don’t capitalize titles if they follow a name or stand alone, such as the judge and the commissioner.
Sentence casing
Travis County staff should use sentence casing as the standard capitalization structure for published content. Sentence casing entails capitalizing only the initial letter of a sentence, along with any proper nouns or specific terms requiring capitalization. For example:
The Travis County Commissioners Court is responsible for overseeing various county initiatives, ensuring effective governance and community development.
Commas
Travis County staff should always use the Oxford comma, also known as the serial comma, when writing. The Oxford comma is used before the conjunction ("and" or "or") in a list of three or more items.
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Do | Don’t | Notes |
|---|---|---|
Learn more about our services. | Click here for more info. | Hyperlinking the text “our services” lets readers know they can expect to be taken to a page specific to services. On the other hand, the text “here” can refer to any number of topics or subject matter. |
Learn more about our services. | Learn more about our services. | Lengthy hyperlinked text can cause confusion and negatively impacts the discoverability of content. Short descriptive text helps improve the discoverability and readability of content. |
Once the affidavit is signed by a notary, please submit it to the District Clerk’s Office. | Once the affidavit is signed by a notary, please submit it to the District Clerk’s Office. Visit their website at https://www.traviscountytx.gov/district-clerk | The hyperlinked text “District Clerk’s Office” complies with accessibility standards as the text is easily picked up by users who rely on screen readers. A URL hyperlink impacts the readability of the text as it is not easily or immediately recognizable where the URL redirects. |
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