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Bold should not be used to indicate headings, only to emphasise important words.
Page margins
Left margin 1.8cm, right margin 1.8cm, top margin 3cm.
When you change a page to landscape orientation, Word changes the left margin to 2cm and the top margin to 2cm. You have to manually fix these by going to Layout > Margins > Custom margins and manually changing the numbers in the Margins section.
Body copy
All text should be styled as 'Body copy'. This means:
- Arial 12pt
- line spacing at set to 'At least 16ptsleft margin 1.5cm, right margin 18cm'
- all text is left justified, no indents for new paragraphs
no italics except for scientific names (E.coli) - do not use italics for quotations, footnotes or any other purpose. Italicised species names are allowed in document titles and headings.
avoid bold, although it can be used sparingly for emphasis - do not use bold to create headings, use the correct heading style.
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As to the formatting of the end references, we follow Government Digital Service requirements which state that references should be easy to understand by anyone, not just specialists., so:
Names and initials of authors have no full stops.
Titles of publications have single speech marks round them.
All links must be embedded in the relevant title or text i.e. no exposed URLs.
Use plain English, so ‘and others’ instead of ‘et al’.
Spell out journal names in full. Google them, if necessary.
No full stop at the end of reference.
Spell out the volume number, issue number and pages.
- Lopez Bernal J, Andrews N, Gower C, Robertson C, Stowe J, Tessier E and others. ‘Effectiveness of the Pfizer-BioNTech and Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccines on covid-19 related symptoms, hospital admissions, and mortality in older adults in England: test negative case-control study’. British Medical Journal 2021: volume 373, page 1088
- Public Health England. ‘Public Health England vaccine effectiveness report – March 2021: Public Health England; 2021’
- Pritchard E, Matthews PC, Stoesser N, Eyre DW, Gethings O, Vihta K-D and others. ‘Impact of vaccination on SARS-CoV-2 cases in the community: a population-based study using the UK’s COVID-19 Infection Survey’. Infectious Diseases 2020: volume 27, issue 5, pages 234-244
- Public Health England. ‘Public Health England COVID-19 vaccine surveillance report: 20 May 2021(week 20)’ Public Health England; 2021
Links
Do not leave URLs exposed. All links must be embedded in the relevant meaningful text.
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The header row of each table must be tagged for accessibility. Do this by highlighting the header row, going to the Table Layout tab and click the Repeat header rows button. The ostensible point of this is to make header rows appear over multiple pages, but it also has the effect of tagging the header row for accessibility and so should be done even if the table is on one page.
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Align content in a table use the Alignment buttons under the Layout tab ie i.e. highlight a column and select top left, top right and so on. DO NOT USE THE SPACE BAR TO POSITION CONTENT IN TABLES.
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