Comments and suggestions are welcome. Please forward them to Hilary Andrade in the marketing department.
Welcome to the SPIE Writing Guide.
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We've moved! You can find the updated, searchable, new version of the SPIE Style Guide at https://spiesupport.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/SSG/overview.
This guide is designed to assist SPIE employees tasked with creating content on spie.org as well as its social media platforms. Please adhere to these guidelines when writing any copy about SPIE and our offerings on spie.org. If there is a style issue not covered by this guide, please refer to The Associated Press Stylebook (known more broadly as AP Style).
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These guidelines are not intended to apply to the spiedigitallibrary.org or spiecareercenter.org.
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It takes many people to maintain, promote, and protect a brand. Everyone associated with the Society has a responsibility to uphold these guidelines. We must all work together to guarantee we present a consistent voice and brand image.
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Use the listing to the left (or the 'hamburger' on mobile) or the brief descriptions of each section below to navigate the guide.
( 01 )
Messaging
Voice and tone reflect our attitude about our subject and our readers. Voice is who the readers hear talking in your copy, and tone is the way in which you are doing the writing.
These statements are critical to the voice and tone of our copy. Bookmark this page for reference.
A tagline is one or two phrases that provides clarity or emphasis to help highlight a brand's mission, purpose, or culture. SPIE has an organizational tagline as well as product line taglines.
A boilerplate is a short paragraph summarizing a company, is always the same, and can be found anywhere people may require that brief description. We have a standard and short boilerplate for SPIE, as well as boilerplate messaging for some product lines.
We should always work to make our content more accessible and usable to the widest possible audience. Here are some tips to consider.
( 02 )
SPIE Terminology
Understand the different iterations of the SPIE name, their use cases, and how to write from the SPIE perspective.
Guidelines for referring to the names of our conferences, symposia, exhibitions and related products.
How to communicate about our various publication products and the Digital Library on the spie.org.
(Not on the Digital Library!)
Tips for talking about Membership, types of Membership, and our educational products.
Guidelines for writing about our Community Support initiatives like Women in Optics, EDI, and IDL.
( 03 )
Grammar and Mechanics
The SPIE style for writing acronyms, initialisms, and abbreviations including how to include our own acronyms in your writing if at all.
Default to American English unless you are creating copy for event webpages for events based in Europe or Australia, then use these common terms.
Style guidelines to follow when creating an unordered or bulleted list on a webpage.
This set of rules clarifies when we capitalize words and when we don't, including headlines and titles, subheads and H-tags, and URLs and emails.
Here on the guidelines on common types of punctuation like: colons, commas, dashes and hyphens, parentheses, and quotation marks. It also talks about punctuation we avoid.
When and where to use italicized words.
How we write numbers on our site including: numerals, money, percentages, fractions, temperature, telephone numbers and expressions of quantity.
The SPIE rules around writing dates and times, including date ranges, months, years, and the 12-hour versus the 24-hour clock.
( 04 )
Word List
Words can be written in different ways, a style guide helps define our standardized spellings and usage. Here’s how we write them.
(If it’s not on this list, defer to the AP Style Guide.)