Your guide to writing good English texts at AU
A new AU English Style Guide has just been launched. The style guide is the product of AU’s language services, a network of translators and language consultants in the former administrative division AU Communication. The guide is intended to help AU employees express themselves clearly, correctly and consistently in English in official and administrative contexts.
The guide is also intended to provide external translators and proofreaders clear standards and guidelines for their work.
Why do we need an English style guide?
According to AU’s guidelines for communicating at a multilingual university, AU’s administration has a duty to communicate in both English and Danish “ in such a way as to ensure that staff and students are in a position to perform their functions in the organisation regardless of linguistic background”. The guidelines also specify that relevant content on the AU website should be available both in Danish and English.
Read the guidelines for communicating at a multilingual university
The purpose of the style guide is thus to help AU employees and their external suppliers live up to these requirements by providing a shared frame of reference for our communication in English. In other words, the style guide will help ensure that we speak the same language when writing for and about Aarhus University.
And it’s necessary to establish a common frame of reference, because English is not a unitary language. There are many forms of correct English, with differences in punctuation, spelling and vocabulary. These differences can lead to inconsistency and misunderstandings in a multilingual context. For example, ‘faculty’ means ‘a department within a university or college devoted to a particular branch of knowledge’. But in the US and Canada, the word can also refer to ‘the staff of such a department’. In the US, exams are supervised by proctors, while they are supervised by invigilators in the UK. The aim of the style guide is to minimise miscommunication and inconsistency by making it easier to make the right linguistic choices in an AU context.
When can you use the style guide?
The style guide is primarily intended to help employees express themselves correctly and consistently in English in official and administrative contexts - for example, in letters or mails to colleagues abroad, in writing reports and memos, translating notices and press releases for the homepage, or preparing conference programmes. The style guide is tailored to these specific AU situations and contexts.
And if your department or office works with external copywriters, translators or proofreaders in connection with PR material, reports or other publications, the guide can provide them with clear standards for their work. However, the guide is not intended as a guide to academic writing. Individual disciplines and fields are governed by their own style guides, and students and members of academic staff are encouraged to familiarise themselves with the relevant standards for their academic text production in English. This is not to say, however, that the style guide can only be used in non-academic contexts. Many of its recommendations apply to good writing in all situations.
What will you find in the style guide?
The guide contains clear, concrete recommendations and explanations about general points of grammar, style and usage, as well as lots of specific examples of what to do (and not to do) in specifically AU-related contexts. It also contains typical pitfalls for Danes writing in English. Typical Danicisms are flagged for ease of reference. And because the university’s guidelines for communication in English stipulate that the AU standard is British English, also provides an overview of the most important differences between American and British English.
Read the AU English Style Guide
The guide will be revised and updated on an annual basis. If you have comments or suggestions about the style guide, please contact language consultant Lenore Messick.
Who’s behind the AU English Style Guide?
The style guide editorial team consists of four translators/language consultants in the former AU Communication. The idea for the style guide evolved out of their own need for a common frame of reference about a year ago. A draft version of the guide was read and commented on by approx. 20 AU employees and by external translators and proofreaders, and many of their comments and suggestions were subsequently incorporated.
The AU English Style Guide is available on the AU Language Portal along with other tools aimed at helping (primarily Danish) employees communicate in English, including AU Translate (Danish-English machine translation) , AU Dictionary (en-da/da-en list of AU terms) and MemSource (translation software).
- Explore the Language Portal
- Please contact language consultant Lenore Messick if you have questions, comments or suggestions about the style guide or the Language Portal.