Brand Guide

Brand Guide

Style Rules

  • The “and” in Adult & Teen Challenge is always written using an ampersand.
  • “National Office” should be considered a proper noun and capitalized when referring to the Adult & Teen Challenge National Office in Ozark, MO.
  • When abbreviating “Adult & Teen Challenge” it should be written “ATC”.
  • Use gender-neutral language such as “chair” or “chairperson” (rather than “chairman”), “police officers” (rather than “policemen”), and so forth.
  • Use “people with disabilities” rather than “handicapped people.”
  • Use “people struggling with addiction” rather than “addicts”
  • Avoid “othering” language.
  • Capitalize Black in a racial, ethnic or cultural sense. The lowercase black is a color, not a person. Learn more about this AP Style rule here: https://apnews.com/afs:Content:9105661462
  • Capitalize Indigenous in reference to original inhabitants of a place.
  • When identifying people in captions, use the format “position, organization” (president, Adult & Teen Challenge)
  • Write out the words for numbers one through nine, and use numerals for most other numbers.
    • If you have two related numbers in the same sentence, you should write them both as numerals if you write one as a numeral. (“The snail advanced 1 inch on the first day and 12 inches on the second day.”)
    • When you are writing two numbers right next to each other, you should use words for one of them and a numeral for the other. (“We tested 52 twelve-inch snails,”)
    • When you put a number at the beginning of a sentence, write out the words. If the number would be ridiculously long if you wrote out the words, you should rephrase the sentence so the number doesn’t come at the beginning.
    • If you’re writing dialogue, for example quoting someone in a magazine article or writing a conversation in fiction, spell out all the numbers.