Style Guide

A couple of exceptions:

  • We always capitalize “Faculty of Law” and “the Faculty” (when talking about the Faculty as an institution).
  • By default, staff and faculty’s degrees will be listed in the Contact page, and won’t be repeated on every page they appear on. If talking about somebody who isn’t faculty or staff, and is a Queen’s graduate (Dean’s Council members, or a Moot supervisor, somebody in a news story, etc.), list their Queen’s Law degrees first, with other Queen’s degrees afterwards in parentheses.
    • Jhn Smith, Law’15
    • Jane De, Law’88, LLM’95 (Com’80).

Who’s talking? THIRD-PERSON AND PRONOUN USE

Remember that site pages generally start with the third person and transition to first-person plural.

“Queen’s Faculty of Law is enriched by the skills, knowledge and experience of students who have been community leaders, excelled in extracurricular activities and enjoyed success in careers prior to the pursuit of a legal education. We benefit from students with inquiring minds who have excelled consistently in a broad range of academic disciplines. Our school…”

Similarly, we generally start texts by addressing readers in the third person, then transitioning to the second person.

“Applicants should be sure to submit their documents before the deadline. If you have questions about the application process, please contact us.” (first-person plural for the Faculty at the end).

WHO’S TALKING? WHAT TO CALL THE FACULTY OF LAW

We are officially the Queen’s University Faculty of Law, and should be introduced as such on a few key pages (our main About page, the faculty’s history, etc.).

Generally speaking, we use “Queen’s Law” to refer to the Queen’s University Faculty of Law on most pages.

Content – audience and voice

Before you start to work on a page, make sure you have a clear idea of:

  • Who the page is for (a prospective student? A current student? A faculty member?)
  • What we want the person who is visiting that page to know, or do
  • Our tone. Queen’s Law is…
    • Inclusive (we use “we” and “ur” language)
    • Professional (we don’t make jokes or use slang on the website)
    • Intelligent

CONTENT – VISION


If you’re stuck trying to find a “voice” for content you’re creating, consider some of the key elements of our identity. Queen’s Law:

  • Fosters and creates future leaders
  • Is a uniquely strong community of students, staff and faculty
  • Exhibits excellence in academics

You’re not obliged to clunkily hammer those points into every text! But try to write things that let you “feel” some of those qualities in the writing.

Try to express what people get out of what our law school offers: assume a reader is wondering “what’s special about this?” when they’re reading text on our site.

Example:

Rather than…

There are five clinics at Queen’s University Faculty of Law. They are the Queen’s Legal Aid Clinic, the Queen’s Family Law Clinic, the Queen’s Prison Law Clinic, the Queen’s Business Law Clinic, and the Queen’s Elder Law Clinic.

Queen’s Faculty of Law students can sign up for these clinics. Students are supervised by directors from each clinic, as well as review counsel, to ensure their work meets standards.

You could try…

A unique experiential learning opportunity, the Queen’s Law Clinics provide our students with hands-on experience while fostering a spirit of community service.

Our clinics include business law, family law, elder law, poverty law, and prison law. Through these five clinics, Queen’s Law students are given the opportunity to act with a high degree of autonomy and responsibility, with the guidance and oversight of our Clinic Directors and review counsel. 

 

Compare to competitors and industry leaders

Review key competitors and industry leaders' websites for inspiration on what types of content to include.  Be critical of their content and consider what they have missed.

 

Try to draft first and come back later

Your best writing will happen if you give yourself a chance to draft text, let it sit for a day or more, and come back to it with fresh eyes for editing. Trying to write, edit, and finalize something in one sitting is generally not as effective as letting a draft “breathe” for a bit and then taking a look at it again later on.

 

Consider Search Engine Optimization

Search engine optimization generally has a negative connotation and that is especially true in the realm of higher education. Despite that, we must acknowledge the value of search engine ranking when it comes to promoting the reputations of our expert faculty. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/asi.23543/full

Ranking high in search engines translates to higher perceived expertise for several key audiences: media, prospective faculty, and law firm recruiters. If our faculty profile pages rank well, there is an increased chance that our faculty will be referenced and cited by the media, further elevating the perception of Queen’s Law overall reputation.  In order to improve our search engine result page (SERP) ranking, we simply need to consider the needs of media and public searchers and then include the words we think they may be searching for in our content and page titles.  From our research, one of the most commonly searched phrases for our realm is “Best Canadian Law School” so we simply need to include that phrase and similar phrases into our content.

Example:

“Queen’s Law was ranked by Maclean's magazine as one of the best Canadian law schools…”