Content guidelines overview
The Penn Medicine style
Writing for the web best practices
Number and time conventions
Grammar
Punctuation
Social media
Standard scope
This standard applies to:
- pennmedicine.org
- All Penn Medicine websites
- Penn Medicine mobile applications
- All Penn Medicine digital products
Overview
Content guidelines are intended to:
- Raise brand awareness, reputation, and preference
- Resonate and connect with audiences
- Demonstrate expertise/leadership
- Inspire trust and loyalty
- Generate media interest through newsworthy content (new, timely, impactful, or actionable)
Our content guidelines
Guidelines
Why this is important
Ensures consistency across all Penn Medicine digital products with regard to voice and tone, capitalization, naming conventions, terminology, references and citations. Includes approved boilerplate content.
Provides guidance related use of bullets, link formatting, word counts, use of bold type/italics/underline, and photo captioning.
Provides guidance related to use of numerals and numbers, time conventions, and currency, percentages, phone number, temperature and time formats.
Provides general grammar guidance covering active and passive voice, tense, pronouns, person-centered language, contractions and abbreviations.
Provides guidance for use of dashes, commas, semi-colons, colons and quotation marks.
Details exceptions for social media content including format and length, tone, lifespan considerations. Includes samples of use.
Related resources
Access the latest version of the Penn Medicine Style Guidelines (requires VPN access) or use the contact below to obtain a copy.
Contact
For questions or assistance, contact web-standards@pennmedicine.upenn.edu.
Last updated
Date
Version
Desciption
06/11/25
1.1.0
Added sub pages for:
05/01/25
1.0.0
Initial Release