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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The Oxford comma is placed right after the word "two"."
Contractions
Shortening two words into one can provide a more informal and friendly tone to your writing. However, negative contractions, like “don’t” and “shouldn’t,” can be occasionally misread, especially in instructional contexts. For that reason, staff should avoid using contractions in service or instructional content. In these instances, keep the words separate, as shown below:
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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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Place a period outside the closing parenthesis if the material inside is not a complete sentence (such as this fragment). (An independent parenthetical sentence, like this one, takes a period before the closing parenthesis.)
When a phrase placed in parentheses (like this one) could qualify as a complete sentence but depends on the surrounding material, do not capitalize the first word or end with a period.
Do not use parentheses to denote a political figure's party affiliation and jurisdiction. Instead, set them off with commas.
Quotation marks
Punctuation, such as periods and commas, always go within quotation marks. For example:
“Justice will be served for the victims of this crime,” the District Attorney said.
There are certain situations where a period may be placed outside the quotation mark, and this usually occurs when the quoted material is just a part of the sentence and not a complete sentence itself. For example:
Applicants must file an affidavit called "Legal Artifact Affidavit".
Time
To ensure clarity and consistency, follow the guidelines below to represent time.
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