University of Detroit Mercy
Name & title: Laurie Peller, Communications Manager
University of Detroit Mercy's identity standards and style guide are at the following website: www.udmercy.edu/marketing/identitystandards.htm
Institution & publication: University of Detroit Mercy, Spiritus alumni magazine
Type of publication: magazine
Readership audience: alumni, donors, friends of the University, parents of current students (some former), faculty/staff
Number of pages: 28
Frequency of publication: twice yearly
Circulation: 65,000
Color: 4-color
Interesting facts about the publication: In the fall issue, we also include an honor roll of donors.
Basic style manual: AP Stylebook, institution
Reason for using the manual: AP is the standard for most journalists, and we wanted to follow suit, but we also use an internal style guide for specific university usage to try to keep consistency across the university. It's also the main guide the University uses to teach our students journalistic style.
Dictionary: Other
Reason for using dictionary: Everyone in the department pretty much uses his/her own dictionary.
Other resources: AP Style Guide
Items on our house style sheet not covered in our manual: To my knowlege, we've covered everything, including some guidelines for writing web content on our website. In previous versions of our style guide, we would give a lot more general grammar, dictionary style information, especially the more common errors people make, ie. its, it's, their, there, they're, but we've now made the manual more specific to university usage.
Items on our house stylesheet that override our manual: One example is that we capitalize "University" when referring directly to UDM or "School" or "College" when referring directly, but for the most part, we try to follow AP style as closely as possible. This way we don't get confused about our style, and we always have a respected reference when people question our style. For example, non-communications people at the university often want to capitalize people's titles no matter what, and are confused when we only capitalize titles when they precede a name, but not when it follows the name. We can always refer them back to the AP Style Book.
Unresolved issues: We still sometimes are not sure how we want to handle the reference to degrees. Our style pretty much is: if the degree is listed in it's formal form, ie. Master of Business Administration, we capitalize. If the degree is referenced less formally, ie, a master's in business, we don't capitalize. This is fine when we are talking about our own degrees, and know what the proper names are, but when we are writing about another university's degrees, it's less clear. We also sometimes get hung up on how to handle internal department names, ie Department of Marketing & Public Affairs vs. Marketing and Public Affairs department.