Language and Grammar

General Language Rules

Only provide information to the users that are relevant to them. Give them just as much information as they need to continue their process.

Eliminate redundancy. It slows down the user unnecessarily.

Write short. If you can omit a word or use a shorter one, do it.

Keep your tone casual and neutral. Write as if you talk to a colleague or a friend and not as if you write a thesis. It often helps to read your text out loud to see if it sounds natural.

Make your copy consistent. Always use the same words to describe the same part of your UI. For instance, if you decide to call something 'Help center' in one part of the UI, do not call it 'Support center' in another part of your UI.

Use familiar, understandable words and phrases. Only use technical jargon if you can't avoid it or if you're absolutely sure that your users will understand it.

General Grammar Rules

Put the most important information first. Users usually just read the first few words of some text and move on if they think that this text doesn't contain any relevant information. (NNGroup, First 2 Words: A Signal for Scanning)

Use contractions. They shorten your text and sound more conversational and natural.

Prefer active voice over passive voice. By addressing users directly, you make them feel more involved. Additionally, phrases in active voice are shorter and easier to understand.

At times, active voice can come across as too harsh. In these rare cases, use passive voice.

Use simple tenses for verbs. Phrases in a simple tense are shorter and easier to understand.

Avoid gendered pronouns. If you can't do so, then use they/their instead of his/her or he/she.

Use numerical digits instead of words for numbers. A digit is way better at catching the user’s eye when users scan over the UI. Since numbers usually contain important information, this is something that we want. (NNGroup, Show Numbers as Numerals When Writing for Online Readers)

Capitalization

For Capitalization Rules, refer to the Capitalization Guidelines.

Punctuation

In general, punctuation provides visual cues to help readers analyze words and phrases. However, as mentioned before, text on the application UI is scanned rather than read. To help readers scan text at a glance, avoid using punctuation in places where it isn’t necessary.

Periods

Don't use a period after a single sentence or phrase used in isolation, such as in an alert or labeled input.

Wherever two or more sentences run together, use a period for each sentence.

Ellipsis

Use the ellipsis character '…' to indicate incompleteness, such as an action in progress or truncated text. Ellipses are also used to indicate that some action is not final, for example in an ellipsis button.

Quotation marks

Don't use quotation marks to distinguish variable values from the surrounding text. Use bold text instead.

If you have to use quotation marks, for example for direct quotes, use double quotation marks instead of single quotation marks.

Ampersand

Use 'and' instead of '&' for flowing text. Similar to digits, ampersands (&) attract attention. Since they don’t contain important information, this is not wanted. (BPXL Craft, Analysing the Ampersand)

For some terms that are commonly displayed together, it is fine to use the ampersand. However, use them with caution.

Exclamation Marks

Avoid exclamation marks. They are easily overused. If you use them, don’t use more than one per paragraph.

Personal Pronouns: Your or My?

Sometimes you will find yourself wondering if you should use the second person or the first person of a personal pronoun in your UI copy. Is it 'Your Documents' or 'My Documents'? Is it 'Activate your account' or 'Activate my account'?

In most cases, it is best to use neither of them: Just say 'Documents' or 'Activate account' instead.

Nevertheless, sometimes the use of a personal pronoun can make UI copy more clear. If that’s the case, then we use personal pronouns the same way as we use them in real life - we imitate a conversation between the application and the user.

Use the second person singular (you, your) when the application is talking to the user. Examples of this are error messages, help, window or page labels, and other places where the system presents content to the user.

Use the first person singular (I, me, my) when the user talks to the application. Examples of this are buttons, menu items, and other controls where the user commands the app.