Style Guide

For the School of Environmental and Biological Sciences and New Jersey Agricultural Experiment Station

The following is meant to be a quick reference for faculty and staff of the Rutgers New Jersey Agricultural Experiment Station and Rutgers School of Environmental and Biological Sciences. For a more comprehensive guide, please see the Rutgers Editorial Style Guide. For those who prepare press releases or other materials for news media outlets, please see the last page of the Rutgers Editorial Style Guide for exceptions to the rules outlined below.

How to refer to the university:

First use:
Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey

Subsequent use:
Rutgers
Rutgers University
The university...

How to refer to the experiment station:

First use:
Rutgers New Jersey Agricultural Experiment Station

Subsequent use:
The experiment station… (preferred)
Rutgers NJAES or NJAES (minimize use of acronyms)

How to refer to Cooperative Extension:

First use:
Cooperative Extension, a unit of Rutgers New Jersey Agricultural Experiment Station
or
Rutgers New Jersey Agricultural Experiment Station Cooperative Extension

If New Jersey Agricultural Experiment Station has already been used, the acronym "NJAES" may be used.

Subsequent use:
Rutgers Cooperative Extension (preferred)
RCE (minimize use of acronyms)

How to refer to the school:

First use:
Rutgers School of Environmental and Biological Sciences

Subsequent use:
The school... (preferred)
Rutgers SEBS or SEBS (minimize use of acronyms)

Also,

Cook College, now referred to as the School of Environmental and Biological Sciences...
The School of Environmental and Biological Sciences, the renamed Cook College...
The School of Environmental and Biological Sciences, the new name for Cook College...

Do NOT use "...formerly Cook College..."

How to refer to the campus:

The George H. Cook campus

How to refer to the regional campuses:

Rutgers–Camden
Rutgers–Newark
Rutgers–New Brunswick

Note the use of an en dash between "Rutgers" and the regional campus name. An en dash can be created in MS Word by selecting [Ctrl][Num][-] (minus/hyphen key on the number keypad). On the web, the en dash can be created with the HTML entity –.

Web addresses:

Do not include "http://" when displaying/printing web addresses (URLs).

Examples:
njaes.rutgers.edu
www.njaes.rutgers.edu

Numbers:

Spell out numbers zero through nine. Use arabic numerals for 10 and above (except for academic credits, percentages, ages, heights, weights, and other dimensions).

Examples:
That will take nine days to complete.
That is a 3-credit class.
Only 2 percent of the class failed.
A 3-year-old girl...
A 5-foot-2-inch woman...
A 7-pound baby

Dates and times:

Use figures for all times except for noon and midnight.

Use a colon to separate hours from minutes, except for times on the hour (formal invitations may use a colon for times on the hour).

Examples:
1 p.m.
1:01 p.m.

Do not abbreviate days of the week or months. Do NOT use ordinals (e.g., April 3rd, September 12th).

Examples:
Monday, September 18, 2006
September 2006
September 18

Telephone numbers:

Use this format:

848-932-1000, ext. 111

If the number follows an address in text, place the entire number in parentheses.