Editing 101
Company and product names
Within reason, follow an organization’s conventions for how it capitalizes and punctuates its names. Many organizations (for example, FedEx) incorporate intercaps, or capital letters in the middle of the name. Other organizations, Yahoo! included, incorporate punctuation characters in their names.
With brand names used in text in a noncommercial context, you may have some leeway with how faithfully you need to reproduce an organization’s trademarked name. For example, you probably don’t need to write product or company names in all uppercase (unless they’re acronyms, like UPS), or use complicated graphic symbols in a name.
TIP
In some cases, you may not be able to replicate a graphic symbol used in a name, particularly in a plain-text email. Example: WALL·E is difficult to reproduce and is generally spelled with a hyphen, WALL-E. When in doubt, look at some of the organization’s press releases or at its copyright page if it has one—you may find an alternative way to write the title using only standard keyboard characters.
Examples
iPod
iPod shuffle
IHOP
PayPal
Visa
MasterCard
Digg
YouTube
For company, product, and website names that use all-lowercase letters, you may find it necessary to use an initial capital letter as you would for most other proper nouns. Otherwise, the names are hard to distinguish in text. But for company names that include a capital letter somewhere (for example, eBay and iPod shuffle), follow the company’s capitalization in most situations—even an internal capital letter will alert the reader that the word or phrase is a proper noun. (For information on how to capitalize names like eBay and iPod in titles and at the beginning of a sentence, see “Capitalization.”)
Abbreviations in company names
Abbreviations such as these may be included as part of a business’s full name:
| Abbreviation | What it stands for |
| Co. | company |
| Corp. | corporation |
| Inc. | incorporated |
| LLC | limited liability corporation |
| LLLP | limited liability limited partnership |
| LP | limited partnership |
| Ltd. | limited |
| Mfg. | manufacturing |
| Mfrs. | manufacturers |
| PLC | public limited company |
| Pty. Ltd. | proprietary limited |
It is rarely necessary to write a business’s full name—Inc. and the like can usually be omitted. When the context does call for a business’s full name, omit the comma before these terms or their abbreviations, including Incorporated or Inc. and Limited or Ltd.
Examples
Toy Captain Pty. Ltd.
Azore Sports LLC
Bootleg Bäby Inc.
Pronouns to refer to companies
When referring to your own or another company, use the third-person singular pronouns it and its. In the United States, a company is treated as a collective noun and requires a singular verb and a singular pronoun. Referring to a company in the plural (they, them, their, theirs) is chiefly a British convention.
Example
Before
The company anticipates an increase in their third-quarter spending. (Uses a singular verb but a plural possessive)
After (U.S. style)
The company anticipates an increase in its third-quarter spending. (Singular verb, singular possessive “its”)
After (British style)
The company anticipate an increase in their third-quarter spending. (Plural verb, plural possessive “their”)
When referring to your company, it may also be acceptable (depending on your site’s voice—see Chapter 3) to use the first-person plural pronouns we, us, our, and ours. Individual bloggers may also use I, me, my, and mine.
Examples
View our tutorials.
Contact us about the Housekeeper 3000 30-day trial offer.
