GRAMMAR AND PUNCTUATION
They matter. Full stop
Some basics to ensure consistency Bullet points - ideal for breaking up lists. We put the first letter in capitals but don’t punctuate between bullets, only using a full stop at the end of the last bullet. There is one exception - where one bullet point is made up of more than one sentence a full stop should be added to the end of each bullet point. BDO is vs BDO are - companies, firms or businesses are collective nouns which are singular, not plural (BDO is committed to…, the business has brought in a new…). Always use ‘which’ not ‘who’ when talking about collective nouns (the firm which has demonstrated…). UK vs US - You should use UK English in all your communications unless you’re talking about something with a US spelling as standard (The US Center for Statistics) Full stops - we don’t use full stops for well known abbreviations (ie, eg, Mr) Exclamation marks - these are to be avoided. If your sentence needs an exclamation mark, re-write it Acronyms and abbreviations - abbreviations which are recognised and appear in the dictionary (NATO, kg, VAT, HMRC) can be used without being spelt in full. If it isn’t a commonly recognised abbreviation, spell in full the first time you use it and use upper case abbreviation after that. This style should also be adopted for internal abbreviations. Repetition - don’t repeat the same word in a sentence, try to find another way of expressing the idea. Unusual characters - avoid unusual characters wherever possible (accented letters, cedillas, ampersands) as they may change unexpectedly (eg when a font is changed). The exception is where a character is part of the brand name of a company (Marks & Spencer). Quote marks - should only be used for quotes from a referenced source and should be written as double inverted commas. Use single quote marks to indicate an expression or ‘form of words’. Your general use of grammar should follow contemporary UK dictionary conventions
Referring to BDO BDO is our trading name – to be used in all general communications and marketing material BDO LLP is our legal name (in the UK) and should be used in all disclaimers, small print, and official notifications The international BDO network or the international
network of BDO Member Firms - never ‘BDO International’ - this doesn’t exist as an entity.
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