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10x styleguide
Welcome to the 10x Content Guide! Here, you’ll find guidance on voice and tone, capitalization and punctuation conventions, how to use specific words and phrases, and more. This style guide is a living document – add to it as often as you need to. For guidance on topics not covered by this style guide, please refer to the 18F Content Guide or the AP Stylebook.
Your organization’s voice is its unique personality — it’s what makes all of your content sound like it’s coming from the same place. Tone, much like tone of voice, is the emotional context of a given type of content. Your voice should remain constant across all of your content, while tone should shift based on content type. The 10x website, to borrow words from Lane, should sound like it’s a wearing a button down shirt, but refuses to tuck it in. The first iteration of the 10x website is talking to potential submitters with a goal of inviting ideas from people with diverse backgrounds and knowledge bases. Therefore, the tone is:
- Knowledgeable
- Helpful
- Approachable
- Welcoming
- Professional
The tone you choose for a certain type of content should reflect your user’s emotional state at the time they’re accessing that content. For example, the tone of the submission form should be more concise and direct than the tone of landing-page copy. For more on choosing appropriate tones, please refer to the 18F Content Guide.
Consistent capitalization is key to building trust with your users. How you choose to capitalize also impacts how your users perceive your organization; title-case capitalization is viewed as more formal, while sentence-case capitalization is often viewed as more approachable and welcoming.
10x uses sentence case for all titles and headlines
- Use the Oxford (serial) comma.
- Add a single space after each period.
- In bulleted lists, add punctuation after list items that are complete sentences; do not add punctuation after single words or sentence fragments.
Acronyms are a type of abbreviation; for simplicity, this guide will use only the term acronyms to describe abbreviations, acronyms, and initialisms. Whenever possible, avoid acronyms. They can confuse readers, especially those who may not be familiar with your site or the concepts it addresses.
This section addresses specialized words and phrases used within the 10x website and to describe the pitching process. Each bold term shows the accepted form of the word (in terms of spelling, capitalization, and punctuation), with accompanying text describing meaning and usage.
As you continue to build out your site, add to this list.
- 10x. Always use a lower case x.
- Digital Services Fund. Use Digital Services Fund on first reference on every page it’s used on. DSF is fine on the second reference if the the reader can reasonably know what you’re referring to.
- Idea.– This what is sent or pitched to 10x to be considered. Use “idea” as what’s being submitted.
- Pitch.– As in “you’ve pitched an idea” Do not say, “develop your pitch,” etc.
- Phases. There are multiple phases of the 10x process, not stages.