VWC Style Guide

VWC STYLE GUIDE

Rev. 02/24

P Percent Use the % sign when paired with a numeral, with no space, in most cases. For example: Average hourly pay rose 3.1% from a year ago; her mortgage rate is 4.75%; about 60% of Americans agreed; he won 56.2% of the vote. Use figures, for example: 1%, 4 percentage points. For amounts less than 1%, precede the decimal with a zero. For example: The cost of living rose 0.6%. In casual uses, use words rather than figures and numbers. For example: She said he has a zero percent chance of winning. Constructions with the % sign take a singular verb when standing alone or when a singular word follows an of construction. For example: The teacher said 60% was a failing grade. He said 50% of the membership was there. Phone number style Use hyphen; do not use parentheses; do not place a 1 in front. Correct examples: 804-555-5555; 888-555-5555 Plurals of acronyms Apostrophe is not needed when forming plurals of acronyms. For example: GSIAs not GSIA’s, FROIs not FROI’s Prepositions Capitalize prepositions with only four or more letters (from, with) in headlines and subheads. For example: “The Commission Announces Winners From Virginia”. See Capitalization Rules for more details. Protective filing Also known as assertion of rights, meaning that an injured worker wishes to protect their rights, but request no action be taken on the claim at the present time. Generally, use the term “assertion of rights” rather than “protective filing” when referring to Claimants cases. Health Care Providers do not have a separate form to use for filing an Assertion of Rights, so they use the term “protective filing.” Punctuation placement with other punctuation Quotes: The period and the comma always go within the quotation marks. For example: “The VWC team is here to help the community.” The dash, semicolon, colon, question mark and the exclamation point go within the quotation marks when they apply to the quoted matter only. They go outside when they apply to the whole sentence. For example: She asked, “What is the VWC team’s purpose?”, Who wrote the “VWC Editorial Style Guide”? Parentheses: Place a period outside a closing parenthesis if the material inside is not a sentence (such as this fragment). (An independent parenthetical sentence, such as this one, takes a period before the closing parenthesis.)

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