How many times can you spot the letter r in:
Guidance for using punctuation and symbols to support accessibility and readability.
Only use the ’@’ symbol in email addresses and social media handles.
Always use colons to introduce lists.
Avoid multiple commas in a sentence. You can do this by breaking it up into a few shorter sentences or changing it into a bulleted list. If needed, use commas (,) to emphasize or frame an idea.
Instead of em dashes (—), write shorter sentences. If you need to emphasize or frame an idea use commas (,).
Use ‘to’ instead of a dash (–) in a span or range of numbers, dates or time.
Dashes and hyphens are different. See hyphens for information on when and how to use them.
Only use ellipses when you’re leaving text out of a long quote. There are no extra spaces before, between or after each of the periods.
Use the CMS Lite special character tool to insert ellipses.
Don’t use exclamation marks in government web content, they can create a sense of alarm. The tone of your content should be calm and direct.
If the word is at the beginning of a sentence, only capitalize the first of the hyphenated words.
Hyphens and dashes are different. See dashes for information on when and how to use them.
Compound words are when two or more words are joined together to create a new word that has a new meaning, such as railroad or crosswalk. Most compound words don’t use hyphens. When in doubt, check the Canadian Oxford dictionary.
See the numbers and dates page for information on decimals and fractions.
Put only one space after a period, not two. Do not use periods in lists.
The capital of the province is Victoria, B.C.
The tax agreement can be found on gov.bc.ca.
Please bring the required documents (signed form and ID).
Use double quotation marks to enclose direct quotes. Punctuation goes inside quotation marks only when they’re part of the quoted material.
Use two sentences where you might have used a semi-colon to link two independent clauses. Don’t use semi-colons at the ends of list items.
Only use slashes in URLs. Using a slash, as in ‘and/or’ creates vagueness. Use gender neutral pronouns they and them instead of using she/her or he/him. See inclusive language and terms for more information.
Special characters are characters that are not numerical and are not used in the English alphabet. Such as © or é. When using punctuation or symbols not listed on this page, use the CMS Lite Rich Text Editor. If youre writing content in a language other than English, you need to tag it as non-English.
If youre using a platform other than CMS Lite, use Unicode character encoding for special characters. This will ensure that screen readers read them correctly.
user
The total number of "r"s in that passage is one hundred and twenty-seven.
assistant