About
The Flickerwell New Zealand Style Guide suggests standards for the design, formatting, and writing of documents in New Zealand English.
It’s designed to promote accessible, clear, and consistent writing. This makes it especially useful for professional writers and people working in teams.
It answers common questions like:
- Are contractions OK? (Sometimes!)
- Should I put spaces around an em dash? (Always!)
- What about single or double quotation marks? (It depends!)
Sometimes, there are multiple ‘correct’ answers. In these situations, we promote the approach that’s least cognitively-demanding, most common in everyday life, or preferable in some other way.
But, of course, you can pick-and-choose the recommendations that suit you best.
Published by Flickerwell, the New Zealand Style Guide can be freely used by any person or organisation in Aotearoa New Zealand. (But please note, it cannot be copied or reproduced without express permission.)
Happy writing.
Ngā mihi,
Ario Smith, Editor
Link to a specific entry
Each entry in the Flickerwell New Zealand Style Guide has a unique URL. There are two ways to find these:
- Click on the entry’s title, then copy the updated URL from your browser’s address bar
- Right-click / long-press on the entry’s title, then choose Copy Link or Copy Link Address
Navigate with keyboard shortcuts
To jump directly to a particular section (for example, entries beginning with ‘X’), use the following key combinations:
Mac
- All browsers: control + option + X
Windows
- Chrome: alt + X (or if that doesn’t work, alt + shift + X)
- Edge: alt + X (or if that doesn’t work, alt + shift + X)
- Firefox: alt + shift + X
- Opera: alt + X
- Safari: alt + X
Website typography
This website uses the open-source IBM Plex Sans typeface. It’s a grotesque sans-serif typeface, designed to offer “natural and engineered letterforms in balance”.
Further information about IBM Plex Sans:
Terms of use
The Flickerwell New Zealand Style Guide is a copyrighted resource that cannot be copied or reproduced without express permission. Flickerwell Limited cannot be held liable for any problems arising from the use of this guide including — but not limited to — information that is inaccurate, or that changes over time.
