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The Shedronomicon Style Guide

This style guide indicates the basic rules of writing content for the Shedronomicon. We aim to ensure consistency across our content and by doing so, attempt to avoid confusion or misunderstanding.

Brand

A reminder from the brand guidelines (published December 2017):

When The Data Shed appears in copy, it should be written in sentence case with initial capitals, i.e. The Data Shed.

Nouns

Capitalise proper nouns throughout. For instance:

  • "engineering", when referring to the discipline, SHOULD be lower-case (unless other grammatical rules apply).
  • "Engineering", when referring to the department within The Data Shed, MUST be capitalised.

The exception is when referring to a specific command, which MUST be displayed in a fixed-width font, for instance:

  • when referring to the language, it MUST be written as Python.
  • when referring to the command, it MUST be written as python.
  • the language, however, is never simply python.

Acronyms

Acronyms2 MUST be written in upper-case, for example:

  • it's ID, not id1.
  • it's HTTP, not http.

Where possible, the acronyms page SHOULD be updated with any lesser-known3 references.

Footnotes

  1. unless you're Freud. ↩

  2. we're not getting into the acronyms vs. initialisms debate. ↩

  3. WWW and HTTP are in common parlance; TCP possibly less so. ↩