P


Park & Ride

  • Park & Ride - not Park and Ride.

part-time

  • Include hyphen

percentages

  • % not per cent.
  • Always use figures with percentages, eg The survey showed that 7% of students did not agree.

phone numbers

  • No hyphens, and spacing as follows, eg +44 (0) 1865 484848.
  • Use international numbers for website and wherever publications, stationery etc could be seen by overseas.
  • No need to use ‘Tel’ before the number.
  • For internal extension numbers use x4458 (not ‘x 4458’ or ‘ext. 4458’).

place names

See Names and places

plain English

  • Lower case ‘plain’ and upper case ‘English’ unless in a title, eg the Plain English Campaign.
  • All content on Oxford Brookes’ websites should be written in plain English.
  • Gov.uk has a useful list of words you should avoid.

postnominals

See Terms of address

programmes

See Courses

pronouns

  • Refer to your target audience as you, even if there are lots of them (never 'some of you' which gives an impersonal tone).
  • For the University or your department, use we and our, eg We proudly support a range of sports at national level and Our many thriving team sports include...
  • Use they to cover both genders, eg When you are briefing each student, make sure they know the deadline.
  • Beware of mixing pronouns, eg When I started work you really had to watch out for any mistakes one might make.

proper names

See Capitalisation

punctuation

See Apostrophes, Colons, Commas, Hyphens, Quotations, Semicolons

PGCE (postgraduate certificate in education)

  • All upper case

PGCert (postgraduate certificate)

  • Lower case ‘ert’

PGDip (postgraduate diploma)

  • Lower case ‘ip’

PhD

  • Lower case ‘h’

postgraduate

  • No hyphen

practice/practise

  • practice (noun)/practise (verb)

Pro Vice-Chancellor

  • Include hyphen