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Editorial style guide: Q

Editorial guidance for terms beginning with 'Q'. Use the style guide to help make your content clear, accessible, and consistent with the rest of the website.

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Read about why we need an editorial style guide.

Qualifications

You should use the lowercase and an apostrophe when speaking generally, and a capital when naming a specific qualification. For example:

  • A student earns their bachelor’s/master's degree
  • A student holds a Bachelor/Master of Arts from Bath

If you're writing about more than one master's degree, you can use 'two master's degrees', but it might be clearer to rephrase the sentence.

Referring to different qualifications

  • BA (Honours)
  • BEng (Honours)
  • DBA
  • HND
  • MA
  • MPhil
  • MRes
  • MSc
  • MSci
  • PgCert
  • PgDip
  • PhD

Quotation marks

Use single quotation marks to quote speech and text in every content type except Announcements. In Announcements, use double quotation marks.

Include punctuation belonging to the quote inside the quotation marks. Place any punctuation that doesn't belong to the quote outside the quotation marks.

Also use single quotation marks to:

  • describe a thing defined by text (such as: please note the 'keep off the grass' sign)
  • refer to published articles (not books or newspapers, which should be in italics)

Do not use quotation marks, single or double, for emphasis.

A quote within a quote

When writing a quote within a quote, use double quotation marks. For example:

Professor Jamal said: 'Anyone who says "I understand quantum physics" doesn't understand it at all.'

When writing an Announcement, use single quotation marks for a quote within a quote.

Long quotes

If a quote runs to more than one paragraph, use single quotation marks at the beginning of the quote, the start of each paragraph and the end of the quote, not at the end of each paragraph. For example:

Professor Brown made the following points: 'The 20th century has been rightly called the century of physics.

'But the 21st century will be the century of biology.'

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