Communications style guide

This style guide is meant to help us with language/style/etc in formal communications relating to Growstuff. It doesn't apply to casual communications (mailing list, wiki pages, etc) -- this is for official website copy, and the like.

See also: Coding style guide, Crop wrangling (contains guidelines for crop names etc)

Name

 * "Growstuff" -- capital G, no other capitalisation.

Languages, generally
Growstuff's official language is US English. This is due not to any particular superiority as a language, but because we expect a majority of our users to be native English speakers, and because US English speakers are less likely to be comfortable with other variants of English than the reverse.

Any text on the website or in other official communications should use US English spelling/grammar.

See also: Internationalization

Tone
Our overall tone is friendly and relaxed, but not cutesy.

Speaking to users

 * When addressing the user on the website, use the second person ("You"). Examples:
 * "Your details have been updated."
 * "Your unread messages"
 * Don't use first person pronouns. Avoid:
 * " My unread messages "

Speaking about users in the third person

 * Avoid gendered pronouns of any kind.
 * Where possible, phrase things to avoid them entirely. Eg. "Skud's garden has been updated." rather than "Skud has updated his/her/zir/their/etc garden".
 * Singular "they" is acceptable, but care should be taken to ensure it doesn't sound clunky and awkward.