Dates should be written Saturday, 24 April 2010 (not 24th).
Use the following construction for spans of time:
Willibald Karl Jentschke was the Council delegate for the Federal Republic of Germany from 1964 to 1967.
Though this often reads better if reworded:
From 1964 to 1967, Willibald Karl Jentschke was the Council delegate for the Federal Republic of Germany.
Use digits:
the 1950s, 1960s, etc.
the roaring 20s
a man in his 60s
Note that no apostrophe is needed before the "s"
Decimals and percentages use the number, not the word: 2% and 50% and 2.6 kilometres.
When referring to angles, spell out “degrees” (as for any other unit):
The tower at Pisa has a tilt of more than 5 degrees
For temperature, use °C
Ethanol boils at 79 °C
For latitude and longitude use ° (closed up to the numeral)
Switzerland lies at latitude 47° north
(note the lower case for north – or south, east or west)
To make a degree (°) symbol on a Mac or a PC, use the key combination Alt-Shift-8 or Alt-0176.
Lower case d. Likewise for group, section, etc.
Use capital letters on the name of a department, but not on the word "department".
CERN has many departments. While Physics is the largest, the Technology department is also substantial.
All caps for ATLAS, ALICE, CMS, TOTEM. But LHCb, LHCf.
One of the few titles that should be capitalised. Avoid abbreviating to DG.
The hyphen is important. Here's an example from a photo caption that shows why:
Stephen Hawking (left) with CERN Director General Rolf Heuer.
The sentence above could be (incorrectly) interpreted to mean that Rolf Heuer is a (military) General, and he is also Director of CERN.
The hyphen renders the compound adjective unambiguous, Heuer is a Director-General.
The plural of Director-General is Directors-General.
Use disc with a "c" when you are referring to optical media such as a CD or DVD. All discs are removable, meaning when you eject the disc from your desktop, it physically comes out of your computer.
Use disk with a "k" for magnetic media, such as a floppy disk, the disk in your computer's hard drive, an external hard drive.
On Drupal websites at CERN, whenever you add a file field to a page, call it "Downloads". Keep this consistent across CERN websites.
