STYLE GUIDE

Grammar and house style

This section contains detailed advice about the HYMS house style. Much of it will be of direct interest only to Communications staff, but in broad terms the advice applies equally to everyone who produces HYMS letters, brochures and publications. You don't need to read it from start to finish, but do know where to find it when you need to check something.

Where there is a single grammatically correct or acceptable way of doing things, these guidelines will tell you what it is. Where there are several equally valid options, the guidelines will usually come down on one side or the other. Arbitrary consistency is better than messy variation!

If you're writing mathematical or scientific texts, you might have to ignore the guidelines below in favour of more precise rules dictated by the academic context.

If you're looking for guidelines on how to spell a particular term, check out the Miscellany.

Talking about HYMS

Firstly, the place is called Hull York Medical School. So please, please, please don't use a hyphen (Hull-York), ampersand (Hull & York) or slash (Hull/York) in the name, and please be evangelical about correcting this whenever you see it elsewhere.

It can be either the Hull York Medical School or just Hull York Medical School -- you can choose whether or not to use the. But if you use the acronym HYMS, you should never use the:

• good: Doctors at HYMS said...
• bad: Doctors at the HYMS said...

HYMS is a perfectly acceptable abbreviation in many contexts, but keep your jargon antennae switched on if you write for an external audience. Consider whether to spell out Hull York Medical School the first time you use it. It all depends on how comfortable you expect your audience to be with the short form.

Talking about students and the curriculum

If you're talking about HYMS students, feel free to use either Year 4 (capital Y) or fourth year (small y). Add a hyphen to the latter if you use it as an adjective:

• students in Year 4 or Year 4 students
• students in the(ir) fourth year or fourth-year students

If you're talking about school students, use the modern National Curriculum year 7 or key stage 2 type terminology (small y, k, s), not the pre-1990s first year. Also, although people at school these days are usually called students to make them sound more grown-up, you can say pupils if you need to make a distinction between those at school and those at university. Avoid schoolchildren unless you really are talking about children.

Phase I, Phase II and Phase III are written just like that, with Roman numerals and capital Ps. If you mention foundation year 1 and foundation year 2, use small fs even though it's capital-F1 and F2 for short.

Blocks (capital B) are different from rotations (small r). Blocks are curriculum elements based on a specific subject: for instance, Block 16 is on 'Nutrition, metabolism, digestion and excretion'. Rotations are the eight-week periods during which student groups study a particular Block in Phase II: for instance, rotation 1 is September and October, rotation 3 is February and March.

The dreaded apostrophe

There's only one Hull York Medical School, so HYMS is singular and it's grammatically correct to add 's to form the genitive:

• good: HYMS's reputation
• bad: HYMS' reputation

In fairness, this is a case where grammatical correctness looks very awkward. The habit of using HYMS', erroneous as it may be, is already fairly entrenched and generally forgiveable. So it's nearly always better to avoid this difficulty by paraphrasing -- or by letting HYMS stand alone, which you can do far more than you might imagine:

• passable: HYMS's staff
• better: HYMS staff
• passable: HYMS's curriculum
• better: the HYMS curriculum
• passable: HYMS's objectives
• better: the objectives of HYMS

If you do get it wrong, don't beat yourself up about it. The confusion is even more widespread in the real world, where only the Queen gets it right:

• St James Park, where Exeter City play;
• St James' Park, where Newcastle United play;
• St James's Park, where children play.

HYMS is as HYMS does

Because HYMS is singular, it takes a singular verb:

• good: HYMS runs a tight ship
• bad: HYMS run a tight ship

And be careful to avoid situations where you might have to make an awkward switch from singular to plural:

• awkward: HYMS welcomes [singular] all its students and we love [plural] them all equally.
• better: At HYMS, we welcome all our students and we love them all equally.

Hospitals and Trusts

For your reference, here are the correct names for various hospitals (small H) and Trusts (capital T) in the HYMS patch:

• Castle Hill Hospital
• Diana, Princess of Wales Hospital (note the comma after Diana and lack of apostrophe on Wales)
• East Riding Of Yorkshire Primary Care Trust (note the irritating and unusual capitalisation of Of)
• Hull and East Riding Hospital
• Hull and East Yorkshire Hospitals NHS Trust
• Hull Teaching Primary Care Trust
• Hull Royal Infirmary
• Humber Mental Health Teaching NHS Trust
• North East Lincolnshire Care Trust Plus
• Northern Lincolnshire and Goole Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust
• North Lincolnshire Primary Care Trust
• North Yorkshire and York Primary Care Trust
• Scarborough and North East Yorkshire Health Care NHS Trust
• Scunthorpe General Hospital
• York Hospital (not the old York District Hospital)
• York Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust

These are correct at time of writing, but they do have a habit of changing fairly frequently, so check with a reliable source if you're in doubt. There's a staggeringly complete list at http://www.nhs.uk/servicedirectories/Pages/ServiceSearch.aspx.

Abbreviations

Go easy on abbreviations in non-technical writing. If they can comfortably be avoided, avoid them.

For instance, after referring to the National Union of Teachers at the start, consider subsequently calling it the union rather than the NUT. This makes for a smoother reading experience, although it wouldn't work if you referred to more than one union in the course of the article, for obvious reasons.

If you use an abbreviation more than once, spell it out the first time you use it, then use it consistently after that:

• good: The Medical Research Council (MRC) yesterday published…

But don't fall into the trap of spelling out an abbreviation and then never using it again. You may as well just drop the abbreviation and use the full phrase.

Also, use your common sense. Few things look sillier than spelling out very common abbreviations for no good reason:

• silly: According to a report by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), humans share 98% of their deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) with chimps.

That might be appropriate if you're writing for a foreign audience or in a very formal publication, but otherwise it's pretty daft.

Finally, don't put full stops or spaces between the letters of acronyms and initialisms:

• good: GMC
• bad: G.M.C. or G M C

(Think about it: would you write H.Y.M.S.?)

Punctuation

Don't you think excessive punctuation looks unprofessional?!?!?!?! One exclamation mark is quite enough!!!!!

Numbers

Write out the numbers (and ordinals) zero to ten in words, and thereafter use digits:

• six years old
• 56 years young
• first, tenth, 20th time around the block

Common sense dictates a few exceptions:

• chapter 3
• page 7
• 2+2=5

You might want to use words for big round numbers (a hundred, a million), and you should definitely use them for vague references to numbers (hundreds and hundreds).

Write out words like million and billion in full, even if you use digits for the rest of a number:

• 300 million years young

The only exception is for currency, where you can choose to use the abbreviations m and bn if you prefer:

• equally good: £65m or £65 million
• equally good: £2.8bn or £2.8 billion

Use a comma to separate thousands, but only for numbers above 9999:

• good: 1500
• bad: 1,500
• good: 57,694
• bad: 57694

Strictly speaking, in this day and age it really ought to be a space rather than a comma (57 694), but this hasn't yet become widespread enough in the UK to read comfortably. Just be aware that our European neighbours would read 57,694 as 'fifty-seven point six nine four', a potential confusion which could get you into hot water when prescribing medicines or ordering paperclips.

Use 24-hour clock for times, except perhaps where it might look silly in an informal context, and include a colon:

• good: 16:15
• bad: 16.15 or 1615

Finally, beware the billion. The old British billion, meaning 'one million million', is nearly obsolete, replaced by the rest of the world's 'one thousand million'. Either use the latter, or make it clear which one you're using.

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