Writing Resources

Like adherence to graphic standards, consistency and quality in copywriting help convey The New School's brand identity. The New School uses the Chicago Manual of Style, 15th edition, as the basis for our editorial style.

The New School Editorial Style Guide Tools and Training is intended to help writers and editors communicate clearly and consistently about The New School to audiences both within the New School community and beyond. The style guide addresses editorial questions that  frequently arise about grammar, spelling, and styling content related to our colleges, departments, research centers, faculty, and alumni.

When producing university communications, keep in mind the persona of a typical New Schooler—a confident but down-to-earth individual—speaking to them in a personal and professional voice. Below are some tips. 

DO Keep in mind the goal behind all messaging: unlocking students' creative potential and courage to innovate.

DO Understand what the primary target audience for your message is hoping to learn or gain and always write with  that in mind.

DO Use the active voice. In the passive voice, ideas can sound vague and awkward. 

DO Write conversationally. Use plain English, as if you’re speaking to a friend or colleague. Write clearly and directly, and use “you” instead of the third person to engage your audience.

DO Be inclusive. We are a big, diverse university. Our communications should reflect that fact.

DON’T sound institutional or overly authoritative. The brand voice is personal and informal. 

DON’T use acronyms or abbreviations with the assumption that everyone knows The New School and its colleges, departments, and other units. Those learning about us for the first time can easily become lost in the alphabet soup of acronyms we use for our colleges, institutes, programs, etc. Establish the identity of the university or specific unit to which you're referring to ensure you don’t confuse your reader.

The first time a school is mentioned in copy, you must use the full name; short names can be used in subsequent references. In longer pieces, intersperse the full name throughout the document.

*The full name of a school or program must be used before an acronym is introduced.

**In general, use the names of schools and programs within the Schools of Public Engagement instead of the college's full name.

Unless it is clear from context, always identify smaller units, or sub-schools, with reference to their home college—for example:

• the School of Media Studies at the Schools of Public Engagement
• the School of Art, Media, and Technology at Parsons
• Parsons’ School of Design Strategies

Consider recasting sentences to avoid the close repetition of the word "school" (e.g., instead of “Parsons School of Design’s School of Fashion,” say “the School of Fashion at Parsons School of Design”)

For more information on university nomenclature, refer to the Editorial Style Guide tools-training.

Think of our university and college boilerplate statements as elevator pitches that set the stage for sharing your stories, whether you’re creating a fact sheet, drafting speaking points, or writing Web copy.

The New School
A century ago, a few great minds imagined higher education that could challenge convention and champion the world-changing power of lifelong learning and creative scholarship. The New School was the result. Today we carry forward this legacy in the schools and colleges making up our university:

Parsons School of Design, Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts, the College of Performing Arts, The New School for Social Research, the Schools of Public Engagement, Parsons Paris, and Continuing and Professional Education. Our diverse community continually dissolves the walls between traditional disciplines—and between the classroom and the world.

Parsons School of Design
Parsons School of Design at The New School is one of the leading institutions for art and design education in the world. Based in New York but active around the world, the school offers undergraduate and graduate programs in the full spectrum of art and design disciplines, as well as online courses and degree and certificate programs. Critical thinking and collaboration are at the heart of a Parsons education. Parsons graduates are leaders in their fields, with a shared commitment to creatively and critically addressing the complexities of life in the 21st century.

Parsons Paris
Established in 1921 as the first American art and design school in Paris, Parsons Paris today is an international community of students and distinguished faculty committed to tackling the challenges of an evolving world with creativity and intellectual rigor. Parsons Paris offers innovative English language bachelor's and master’s degree programs in fashion, strategic design management, and art, media, and technology. Curricula bring together the globally renowned pedagogy of Parsons School of Design and the unique resources of Paris, with its heritage brands, forward-looking entrepreneurial culture, and access to Europe and beyond. Together with Parsons in New York and The New School—Parsons’ parent university—Parsons Paris maintains a network of local and global universities, cultural institutions, and organizations and businesses. Students draw inspiration from this dynamic city and the school's collaborative interdisciplinary culture and after graduating go on to pioneer new industries and pursue creative careers in Paris and worldwide.

Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts
Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts is The New School's four-year liberal arts college. What began as the experimental Freshman Year Program in 1972 transitioned into the Seminar College in 1975 and became a college of the university in 1985. Since Lang's founding, its mission has been informed by the values of its namesake: to foster critical thinking, social justice, and cross-cultural understanding.

College of Performing Arts
The College of Performing Arts at The New School was formed in 2015 and draws together the renowned Mannes School of Music, the legendary School of Jazz and Contemporary Music, and the groundbreaking School of Drama. With each school contributing its unique culture of creative excellence, the College of Performing Arts is a hub for cross-disciplinary collaboration, bold experimentation, innovative education, and world-class performances. The more than 1,100 students at the College of Performing Arts are actors, performers, writers, improvisers, creative technologists, entrepreneurs, composers, arts managers, and multidisciplinary artists who believe in the transformative power of the arts for all people. New York City’s Greenwich Village provides the backdrop for the College of Performing Arts, which is housed at Arnhold Hall on West 13th Street and the historic Westbeth Artists Community on Bank Street.

The New School for Social Research
Offering rigorous programs in the social sciences, philosophy, and history, The New School for Social Research fosters an intellectual environment that challenges orthodoxy, promotes public discourse, and encourages collaboration across disciplines. With more than 75 full-time faculty members, our ten departments and programs offer master's and doctoral degrees to 800 graduate students from 70 countries. Our interdisciplinary centers and institutes provide further opportunities for deep inquiry and innovative collaborations, particularly at the intersection of social theory, policy, and design. We welcome everyone interested in challenging the status quo and creating a more just world.

Schools of Public Engagement
Designed for individuals at all stages of life and career, the innovative programs offered by the Schools of Public Engagement carry forward the university’s mission of fostering social justice and equity around the world. In graduate and undergraduate programs in media, creative writing, international affairs, policy, management, and environmentalism, our students form a community that integrates real-world practice with cutting-edge theory and questions what others take for granted.

Continuing and Professional Studies
Continuing and Professional Education (CPE) at The New School is a comprehensive academic unit offering open-enrollment nondegree courses and noncredit certificates for adults and summer and school-year programs for youth and pre-college students delivered through on-campus and online platforms. Programs are offered in the areas of art, design, and fashion and draw on The New School’s rich legacy of innovative instruction and creative practice. Led by faculty from the university’s world-renowned colleges—including Parsons School of Design—our diverse student population of more than 6,000 motivated pre-college students, adult learners, and working professionals take part in CPE’s 500 fall, spring, and summer courses. They leave with skills relevant and applicable to a range of creative fields. Led by faculty from the university’s world-renowned colleges—including Parsons School of Design—our diverse student population of motivated pre-college students, adult learners, and working professionals benefit from our high-quality, accessible programs with direct benefits for those focused on work in the creative economy.

Parsons Executive Education
Parsons Executive Education at The New School operates at the intersection of design and global socioeconomic trends to equip business leaders with the skills and tools they need to navigate a rapidly changing world. It is part of Continuing and Professional Education at The New School, which combines a contemporary approach to learning with faculty who are practitioners at the top of their fields and offers a wide range of subjects for learners of all ages.

Online material is best presented in short segments of text written in a clear, concise style, with ample use of editorial landmarks such as headings. This style facilitates scanning, a reading method used by many Web readers. But online prose does not have to be stripped down to a few headlines and bullet points to be effective.

Prose
General advice on clear, concise writing:

• Never use the passive where you can use the active.
• Never use a long word where a short one will do.
• If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
• Avoid the use of parentheticals and em or en dashes. If you write clearly and concisely, you won't need them.
• Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.

Chunking Content
Rather than provide a single page with all the information on a topic, break the information into chunks. Group related pieces of content into subsections and present discrete topics in pages in those sections. This approach accommodates online reading by providing direct access to subcategories of information rather than combining all the information about a topic on a single page.

This method of presenting information translates well to the Web for several reasons:

• Few Web users read long passages of text on screen.
• Discrete chunks of information lend themselves to Web links. Users of Web links expect to find a small amount of relevant information, not a book's worth of general content.
• Through chunking, information can be organized and presented in a modular layout that is consistent throughout the site. This allows users not only to apply their experience with a site in future searches and explorations but also to predict how an unfamiliar section of a website will be organized.

The concept of a chunk of information must be flexible and consistent with common sense, logical organization, and convenience. Let the nature of the content suggest how it should be subdivided and organized.

Front-Load Your Content
Make sure the text you present is of immediate value. Avoid empty chatter, such as welcome messages from unit managers or instructions for using the site. Don't use the first paragraph on a page to tell users what information they'll find on the page; instead, start with the information, written in a concise and factual inverted pyramid style.

The inverted pyramid style offers a number of advantages:

• Important information comes first, where it is more likely to be seen and remembered.
• The front-loading of content permits efficient scanning for information.
• The major facts presented at the beginning establish a context for later secondary information.
• The structure places facts and keywords at the head of the page, where they carry more weight in search engine relevance analysis.

Stick to the Point
Write in easily understood sentences, and keep the content of each page focused on the subject matter. This focus helps the reader evaluate the page content quickly, optimizes search engine visibility, and improves search ranking.

Segment Text for Easy Scanning
Browsing a page is easier when the text is broken into segments, introduced by headings that name or describe the subject of the segments. Creating these segments often requires breaking up long paragraphs and using more subheadings than you would for print publication. Remember that a long paragraph may fill a computer screen with a visually monotonous block of text.

Use Descriptive Headings
Avoid catchy but meaningless headings. Don't force readers to read a text segment to identify its topic.

Hyperlinks

• Link short descriptive phrases within body copy. Do not use phrases like "click here," "learn more," or "go to."
• When linking to another website, use the name of the site, not its URL (e.g., MyNewSchool, not my.newschool.edu).
• All links to external websites, including New School subdomains, should open in a new browser window.
• Use specific, deep links, instead of generic ones (e.g., https://studentaid.ed.gov/sa/types, not https://studentaid.ed.gov/sa/).
• Make sure email addresses use mailto: hot links and are written in lowercase (e.g., [email protected], not [email protected]).
• Do not link headings.
• Highlighting or linking meaningless or ambiguous phrases will not help you optimize your content for search engines and may even harm the search visibility of your page by adding confusing keywords to the mix.

Maintain Your Content
Regularly review and update your webpages. Out-of-date or incorrect Web content frustrates users and reflects poorly on the university. Bimonthly or quarterly reviews are sufficient for some webpages; others require more frequent revision.

HTML is the key to getting maximum flexibility and return on your investment in Web content. From its beginnings, HTML was designed to clearly define a document's hierarchical structure (headline 1, headline 2, paragraph, list, headline 3 etc.) and the visual presentation of the document (boldface, italics, font, type size, color, etc.). HTML markup is considered semantic when standard HTML tags are used to convey meaning and content structure, it is not simply to make text look a certain way in a browser.

The semantic approach to Web markup is a central concept underlying efficient Web coding, information architecture, universal usability, search engine visibility, and maximum display flexibility. Web content is accessed through Web browsers, mobile computing devices of all kinds, and screen readers. It is also read by search engines and other computing systems, which extract meaning and context from the way the content is marked up in HTML.

The most important headline on any page is the page title. On this page it is the red text at the top of the page. You will never need to create a title on a New School website, it is something set by the CMS.

This is how you see the content:

This is ordinary paragraph text within the body of the document, in which words and phrases may be set in bold for emphasis or italics to mark them as book titles. Use boldface type for emphasis sparingly.

This is a Sub-headline That is Secondary in Importance to the Page Title

Present related things in the form of a list.

• A list signals that items are conceptually related.
• Lists can be ordered (with numerals) or unordered (with bullets).
• Cascading Style Sheets can be used to style lists in many different ways.

This is a Sub-Headline Related to the Secondary One Above

The style of this headline indicates to readers and search engines that it is less important than the larger one above.

This is how browsers and search engines see the same content:

<h1>The Page Title</h1>
<p>This is ordinary paragraph text within the body of the document, in which words and phrases may be set in bold for emphasis or italics to mark them as <em>book titles</em>. <strong>Use boldface type for emphasis sparingly<strong>.</p>
<h2>This is a Sub-Headline of Secondary Importance to the Page Title</h2>
<p>Present related things in the form of a list.</p>
<ul>
<li>A list signals that items are conceptually related.</li>
<li>Lists may be ordered (with numerals) or unordered (with bullets).</li>
<li>Cascading Style Sheets can be used to style lists in many different ways.</li>
</ul>
<h3>This is a Sub-eadline Related to the Secondary One Above</h3>
<p>The style of this headline indicates to readers and search engines that it is less important than the larger one above.</p>

On the surface, a structured document looks no different from one in which font size and other visual formatting are used to distinguish elements such as headings. When it comes to functionality, however, structure gives a webpage power and utility. Even in the simple example above, a search engine would be able to distinguish the importance and priority of the headlines, determine which keywords are important, and identify conceptually related items in a list. A Cascading Style Sheet designed specifically for mobile phones could display the headlines and text in fonts appropriate for small screens, and a screen reader would know where and how to pause or change voice tone to convey the content structure to a visually impaired reader.

On the New School website, the page title (H1) is rendered by the CMS, which automatically applies the title head tag; you need to concern yourself only with labeling heads H2, H3, H4, etc.. Keep in mind that the level of importance increases as the number in the heading designation decreases.

When readers use Web search engines, they generally enter words or short phrases that name or describe what they are seeking. Along with the page title, these words and phrases, known as keywords, determine the relevance rank of a page in the search engine's indexes. For search engine optimization (SEO), a good keyword strategy is to make sure that key page elements are working in concert to present the page content accurately. Ideally, your page should have one key word or phrase, which appears in most or all of the following elements:

• Page title
• Major (h1, h2, or h3) headings
• The words that appear early in titles and near the beginnings of the top five paragraphs of text

Never gratuitously repeat keywords or use tricks like placing white text on a white background to hide keywords. Even in well-written and edited text, keywords will make up only 5 to 8 percent of the number of words on an average page of text. Pages with a suspiciously high keyword rate will lose search engine ranking; pages in which hidden word repetition tricks are used may be banned from mainstream search engines.

The best keyword advice for good search visibility are the same as those for writing well for the Web; write clear, concise, interesting prose, and check your page titles and the other elements listed above to make sure key descriptive words or phrases are featured.

The New School has an editorial style unique to the university, outlined in the New School Editorial Style Guide. The style guide can be downloaded from Marketing and Communication's website. It is occasionally updated by our editorial team, so check periodically to make sure you are using the most current version. For guidance on matters not covered in the style guide, see the Chicago Manual of Style.