Language style guide

Abbreviations

Avoid when you can. If unavoidable, do not use full stops – eg USA not U.S.A. Ensure any acronym or abbreviation that may be unfamiliar to your audience is spelled out in full the first time it is used, eg. Purified Terephthalic Acid (PTA).
Spell out company name – everywhere. Aker Carbon Capture, not ACC.

Arctic

Arctic is the name of the place. Conditions that are like those in that place are arctic (lower-case a). 

Avoid the following

• Diagonal dashes (/) between words – use “and” or “or” to differentiate the words
• etc as it looks unfinished. Alternatively say “such as”
• Ampersands (&) except in established terms such as R&D
• Italics (use bold to highlight words)
• Spaces around a forward slash, i.e. yes/no, not yes / no

Bullet points

• Do not use full stops at the end of your bullets (a bullet should not normally include full sentences)
• Preferred bullet symbol is a perfect circle

Capitalization

• Arctic is the proper name of a region, the adjective is arctic
• The Executive Management Team (EMT) is upper case
• Titles are generally upper case (Chief Financial Officer)

Capabilities and competency

Use “capabilities” to describe the collective know-how or expertise of a group of people or a company, including when you would say “kompetanse” in Norwegian.

​​​​Client vs customer

• Use customer, not client

Compound words and hyphenation

• Life cycle, life-cycle or lifecycle? Lifecycle
• World wide, world-wide or worldwide? Worldwide
• Cost efficient or cost-efficient? Cost-efficient (as adjective)
• Breakthrough or. break-through? Breakthrough
• Well… positioned? Depends on context: “we are well positioned,”; “it is a well-positioned object”
• In the long term but long-term thinking
• Whistleblowing rather than whistle blowing or whistle-blowing

• gas-to-power
• waste-to-energy
• Use most recent names of customers (Altrad Babcock, Port of Antwerp-Bruges)
• Norcem Heidelberg Materials
• Net-Zero
• CCUS
• Aker Carbon Capture group
• Board of Directors
• directors
• Executive Management Team
• executive management
• US English
• Brevik CCS
• Twence CCU
• CO₂
• Just Catch^TM
• Big Catch^TM
• Just Catch Offshore^TM

Date and time​​​​​​​

Dates are written in the following way: 31 December 2020.
“As of 31 December 2020” not “As from” or “As at”.
Time is written number-colon-number using the 24 hour clock. Include the relevant time zone, e.g. 13:04 CET.

​​​​​​​First or third person

Combine as seems natural. For formal (financial) reporting, use third person singular (“Aker Carbon Capture is…”). In less formal or “conversational” applications, use first person plural (“We are…”). In reports, you may start a paragraph in the third person before moving to the first person (“Aker Carbon Capture blah blah blahed. After that we blahblahed and…”).

Footnotes

Use numbers, not symbols, so ¹ not *

Headlines and headings

Always use sentence case in headlines and headings.

Group

The Aker group is all the Aker companies combined. Use Aker ASA is that is the company you refer to. Aker Horizons is a company, not a group. Aker Offshore Wind, Aker Carbon Capture, Rainpower etc. are portfolio companies or Aker Horizons companies.

Language

The business language of Aker Carbon Capture is US English.

Life of field

Not hyphenated, so “life of field” not “life-of-field”

Low carbon

Low carbon (or low-carbon solutions) is a term derived from mostly associated with the oil and gas industry and should be avoided. Use decarbonizing, where and when possible.

Numbers

• Money: modifier-space-number-space-modifier, so: NOK 8.1 million
• Measurements: number-nospace-unit, or text so: 5m or 6′ or seven feet or 40,000 fathoms
• Thousands: use a comma to separate groups of numbers, thus: 123,456,789
• Decimal points are full stops, not commas, so: NOK 88.78
• Numbers less than 11 should be written in full (one, two, three) except where they are decimals or measures – eg 3.1 or 7cm.
• Negative numbers should be “negative” in text and “-” in numbers, so negative NOK 5 billion or NOK -5,000
• Ranges should be number-dash-number (no spaces), thus: 40-50
• Percent: percent not per cent, so: five percent or 5.5% or 15 percent
• Telephone numbers (and addresses): use local standards

Employees vs contract staff

Use “employees” to describe people employed directly by Aker Carbon Capture. People engaged via third parties (“agency” or “consultants” including those employed via NES Advantage) should be described as “contract staff”. So, not “own staff vs hired-ins” but “employees vs contract staff”. Do not use “permanent” to describe employees or contract staff.
You should use these distinctions only when they are specifically required: generally we want to talk about “our people”.

Paris

The Paris Agreement. Not Paris goals or Paris targets. Spell out “the climate goals set out by the Paris Agreement”.

Percent

Percent not per cent, so: five percent or 5.5% or 15 percent. The % can be used in headlines, tables and graphic presentations, but not in body text.

Quotation marks

Use single quotes only for quotations within quotations. Other than direct quotes, try to avoid them altogether. Where you have to use quotation marks, use double marks – i.e. ” “.

Renewables vs. Renewable Energy

Spell it out when you can, using both words

Slash

No spaces around a forward slash, ie yes/no, not yes / no

Spacing

Do not use a double space after punctuation.

US or USA

“the US” (except when formally referring to the country – e.g “operations in the US” but “Houston, Texas, USA”).

World-class leader in innovation

Avoid essentially meaningless verbiage unless you can support it with evidence. If you have the evidence, use that instead!

Whistleblowing

Whistle blowing, whistle-blowing or whistleblowing? All three seem to be in general use, with only the first involving peas and jumpers-for-goalposts. Overall they seem to be about evenly matched. Normally these things start with separate words, become linked with a hyphen and finally evolve into a single word. You can argue where we are on that line, but I guess we just have to choose one. The UN Global Compact seems to lean towards the hyphenated version, but we shall use whistleblowing (all one word).

Z

We use US spelling, so we write industrialized, commoditized and organization.