The purpose of these copywriting principles are to serve as a single source of truth for all Freelancer staff when writing within the Freelancer product. This style guide is a living document, and will continue to be updated to reflect new trends, cultural developments and use cases.

The primary goal of product copy is to provide clear information so that users can efficiently interact with the product. To achieve this in product copy must be:

Use active voice.The typical structure is subject (person/thing acting) verb (the action) object (receives the action).

In active voice, the subject of the sentence does the action. In passive voice, the subject of the sentence has the action done to it.

Words like “was” and “by” may indicate that you’re writing in passive voice. Scan for these words and rework sentences where they appear.

Freelancer serves millions of users in hundreds of countries and territories. It's much easier for a translator to clearly communicate ideas written in straightforward, uncomplicated sentences.

We’ve positioned ourselves as a .com, not a .com.au or .co.uk. Our users come from all over the world, but write to a US audience. This means no OUs, lots of Zs and R after E. It also means you traveled illegally instead of travelled illegally, forged a check instead of a cheque, faced judgment instead of judgement, got sent to jail instead of gaol and ended up in a correctional center, not a correctional centre.

We adhere to the Associated Press Stylebook for capitalization, abbreviations and grammar. We use Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary for spelling.

Adhering to certain rules of grammar and mechanics helps us keep our writing clear and consistent

We use a few different forms of capitalization, however by default, all copy should be written in sentence case, by capitalizing the first letter of each sentence. Subsequent words should be written in lowercase letters. Proper nouns (companies, products,countries, people) are an exception. Never use all capital letters when constructing words.

Buttons should be written with the title case with each word capitalized, except when words are articles, prepositions, or conjunctions.

Spell out a number when it begins a sentence. Otherwise, use the numeral. This includes ordinals.

Numbers over 3 digits get commas:

Numbers should be written in full but can be abbreviated if there are space restrictions.

Using our Freelancer date range pipe will avoid having to format dates manually, however here is an overview. For short dates (numeric dates), use a pre-defined format as these will automatically be localised. These are also preferred for longer dates due to nicer localisation, but not enforced.

As a default use the long date format, the 3-letter month abbreviation should be used. Use the short date format only if space is an issue.

Use the 12-hour clock, then a space, followed by am or pm. Don’t use minutes for on-the-hour time.

Include a time zone only if it’s necessary, such as for an event listing. Use the time zone’s abbreviation following the am or pm, for example, 4:00 pm NZT.

Use an en dash with spaces in between (–) for a fixed range of numbers. Create the en dash with keystroke option + shift + hyphen (on Macs). In most cases, our formatting pipes will automatically manage range formatting as well.

Using our Freelancer currency pipe will avoid having to format currency manually, however here is an overview.

When writing about currency, use the dollar sign before the amount and the currency abbreviation (ISO code) after the amount. Include a decimal and number of cents if more than 0.

Always place the negative symbol before the currency and amount

If there’s a chance your reader won’t recognize an abbreviation or acronym, spell it out the first time you mention it. Then use the short version for all other references in the same page.

If the abbreviation or acronym is well known (easily found on a search engine), like API or HTML, use it instead (and don’t worry about spelling it out).

Emojis should be avoided when writing in product copy.

Spell out fractions. Use decimal points when a number can’t be easily written out as a fraction, like 1.375 or 47.2.

Use exclamation points sparingly, and never more than one at a time. They’re like high-fives: A well-timed one is great, but too many can be annoying. Never use exclamation points in failure messages or alerts. When in doubt, avoid!

Don't use ampersands unless one is part of a company or brand name.

Capitalize the names of websites and web publications. Don’t italicize. Avoid spelling out URLs, but when you need to, leave off the http://www .

For storage and memory sizes, the unit of measurement should be uppercase. For most other units, use lowercase according to ISO standards (kg, cm, lbs). Include a space between the number and unit of measurement.