Writing

Use these techniques to create content that meets user needs and is accessible and usable by all.

• Plain language

  Learn techniques for making your content easy to understand and usable by all audiences

• Tone

  Vary tone for different circumstances, understand what pronouns to use

• CRA audiences and user needs

  Learn about the CRA's target and priority audiences and understand users’ different needs, abilities and preferences

• Terminology

  Choose the correct terminology for clear, consistent and inclusive communications

Follow these writing standards to create quality content and ensure consistency across CRA information products.

• Capitalization In development

  When to capitalize words and when to use lowercase

• Punctuation

  Apostrophes, commas, dashes and hyphens, periods, quotation marks

• Emphasis

  Using bold, italics and underline

• Short forms

  When and how to use acronyms, abbreviations, initialisms and contractions

• Numbers and symbols

  How to use and format numbers and symbols like dollar amounts, fractions and percentages

• Dates and times

  How to write dates and times for readability

• Contact information

  Mailing addresses, phone and fax numbers, email addresses

• Links

  Effective and accessible approaches to creating clickable hyperlinks on text, buttons and images

• References

  Referring to forms, publications, web pages, legislation, court cases

Organize your content using a logical structure that promotes scannability.

• Content location and structure

  Organize content into logical groupings and structure it in a way that helps users find what they need

• Avoid frequently asked questions (FAQs)

  Why you shouldn't create FAQs and what you should do instead

• Headings and titles

  Create content headings and titles that are clear, concise and hierarchical

• Doormats

  How and when to use the doormat pattern to present a set of links and descriptions in concise blocks

• Lists

  Understand different types of lists and how to use them

• Tables

  How and when to display data in rows and columns

• Metadata Infozone

  Create metadata to improve the findability of your Infozone and Canada.ca web content