Become a Cloudways Author and
Share Your Expertise

You’re writing for global businesses, startups, and developers. Keep it useful, human, and easy to read.

Tone

• Clear, friendly, educational, and earnest
• Fun, not flippant
• Knowledgeable, not condescending
• Caring, not impractical

Point of view: Write in the second person. Talk to “you,” not “users.”

You’re writing for readers around the world, so default to inclusive, neutral language.

• Use American English and follow AP Style for anything not covered here
• Skip region-specific jargon and idioms
• Use slang sparingly — never as a central metaphor
• Use singular “they” for an individual
• Avoid militaristic analogies (“plan of action,” not “plan of attack”)
• Avoid offensive metaphors (“deny list,” not “blacklist”)

• Mix active and passive voice for rhythm
• Use contractions (“you’re,” “it’s,” “don’t”)
• Always use the Oxford comma
• One space between sentences
• Punctuation goes inside quotation marks

• Write headings in sentence case
• Don’t capitalize common terms like “cloud” or “server” unless they’re part of a proper name
• Hyperlink descriptive text, never the word “here”

• Spell out abbreviations on first use, with the acronym in parentheses
• Skip the spell-out for common ones (API, CLI, URL, HTTP)
• Write SMBs as “small- and medium-sized businesses”
• Spell out numbers under 10 and any number that starts a sentence
• Use numerals for 10 and up, ranges, currency, and units of measurement
• Use commas for numbers over three digits