Quick Style Guide
UNSW Business School
Taxation and Business Law
business.unsw.edu.au
Last Updated 20 February 2017 CRICOS Code 00098G








1. Presenting your assignment
Your assignment must be submitted electronically through Turnitin on Moodle. Assignments
should be typed in 12 point Times New Roman or equivalent font and have adequate
margins. Use double or 1.5 spacing between lines.
Your assignment should include both footnotes and a bibliography. You should reference
your assignment using the rules in the Australian Guide to Legal Citation (3rd ed), available
at http://www.law.unimelb.edu.au/mulr/aglc. Section 2 below contains some examples of
how to apply the AGLC to the different types of sources you might use in your assignment.
The word limit for the assignment is calculated by reference to all text in the assignment.
This excludes citations and references in the footnotes and the bibliography, but includes
discursive text within footnotes.
Some style tips to assist with your writing are set out on section 3.
2. Referencing
Referencing means acknowledging the sources for the information and ideas in your writing.
Referencing and citing sources are a vital part of academic and legal writing. Your
assignment must fully and properly cite all the sources on which you have drawn. Using the
words or ideas of another person without acknowledgement is plagiarism and amounts to
academic misconduct.
In your assignment, you may need to refer to a range of materials including different Acts,
Regulations, legislative instruments, Bills, cases (that is, decisions of courts and tribunals),
government reports and discussion papers, books, chapters in books, journal articles,
newspapers and periodicals, radio and television broadcasts and websites.
Here are some examples of how to cite these types of sources. You can also refer to the
quick guide to the AGLC system of referencing available at
http://law.unimelb.edu.au/mulr/submissions/quick-aglc.
This quick style guide contains information about how to present and reference your
assignment in TABL2741 Business Entities.
The School of Taxation and Business Law uses the legal footnote method of referencing as
set out in the Australian Guide to Legal Citation (3rd ed). This is different from the Harvard
style of referencing that you may be familiar with from your other subjects.
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 Legislation, legislative instruments, rules and codes
 Corporations Act 2001 (Cth) s 180(1).
Corporations Regulations 2001 (Cth) reg 7.10.01.
Australian Securities and Investments Commission Act 2001 (Cth) s 12
Partnership Act 1892 (NSW) s14
Corporations Amendment (Professional Standards of Financial Advisers) Bill 2015.
Australian Securities and Investments Commission, ASIC Corporations (Basic Deposit
and General Insurance Product Distribution) Instrument 2015/682, 22 July 2015.
 Cases
Industrial Equity Ltd v Blackburn (1997) 137 CLR 567.
ASIC v Healey [2011] FCA 717.
 Government reports
Financial System Inquiry, Treasury (Cth), Financial System Inquiry Final Report (28
November 2014).
 Books and chapters in books
J Harris, A Hargovan and M Adams, Australian Corporate Law (LexisNexis, 5th ed,
2016).
Paul Redmond, ‘Safe Harbours or Sleepy Hollows: Does Australia Need a Statutory
Business Judgment Rule? in Ian Ramsay (ed), Corporate Governance and the Duties of
Company Directors (Melbourne University Centre for Corporate Law and Securities
Regulation, 1997) 185.
 Looseleaf services
LexisNexis Butterworths, Australian Consumer Credit Law (at Release 83) [3.005].
 Journal articles
Anil Hargovan, ‘Corporate Governance Lessons from James Hardie’ (2009) 39
Melbourne University Law Review 984.
Ian Ramsay and David Noakes, ‘Piercing the Corporate Veil in Australia’ (2001) 19
Company and Securities Law Journal 250.
 Internet materials
Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, Cartels
https://www.accc.gov.au/business/anti-competitive-behaviour/cartels.
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 Newspaper articles
Tess Ingram, ‘Ellison accused of breaching directors duties’ Australian Financial Review,
(online), 21 February 2017 http://www.afr.com/business/mining/iron-ore/chris-ellison-
bruce-goulds-accused-of-breaching-director-duties-at-mesa-minerals-20170220-guh2jv

Radio and television broadcasts
ABC Television, ‘Banking Bad’, Four Corners, 3 July 2014 (Adele Ferguson and Deb
Masters) http://www.abc.net.au/4corners/stories/2014/05/05/3995954.htm.
ABC Radio National, ‘Domino’s CEO says he’s ‘proud’ of franchisees as investigation
into worker exploitation continues’ The World Today, 15 February 2017 (David Taylor)
http://www.abc.net.au/worldtoday/content/2016/s4620271.htm.
3. Style tips
Following these style tips will help to improve your writing in Taxation and Business Law.
Above all, remember the aim is to share what you know through your writing in a way that is
interesting, engaging and easy to follow, and demonstrates your mastery of the material and
the method.
 Headings: Capitalise the first word and proper nouns only; different level headings
should be consistently formatted. Do not use too many heading levels – three at most.
 Footnotes: These should not be used to make substantive points; they should be
explanatory only and kept to a minimum. All bibliographical details, case citations etc.
should be contained in the footnotes, not in text. Footnote signifiers (that is, the little
number) should appear after punctuation and quotations.
 Abbreviations: Keep periods to a minimum – for example, ‘ASIC’ not ‘A.S.I.C.’; ‘A
Gibson’ not ‘A. Gibson’.
 Acronyms: When first used, put the full name or phrase followed by the acronym in
brackets - for example, ‘Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC)’.
Subsequently you can just use the acronym. Acronyms are preceded by ‘the’ only if they
are not usually pronounced as a word. For example, ‘ASIC’ but ‘the FSI’. Acronyms are
not italicised.
 Quotations: Quotations of less than 30 words should be placed within the text in single
inverted commas. A quotation within a quotation should have double inverted commas.
Quotations of more than 30 words should be indented, without quotation marks and in a
smaller font.
 Dates: Use the forms ’24 May 2015’, ‘nineteenth century’, ‘1980s’, ‘1992-97’.
 Initial citations: The full citation should always be used when a source is first mentioned
– that is, the form of citation shown in section 2.
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 Pinpoint citation: Each citation should, where relevant, also include the ‘pinpoint’
reference – that is, the exact paragraph, section or page you are referring to. For
example, ASIC v Healey [2011] FCA 717 at [20].
 Subsequent citations: Each subsequent time a source is cited you can use an
abbreviated form – for example, Corporations Act s 1325; Woolworths at [34]; Harris,
Hargovan and Adams, above n 2, 45; Hargovan, above n 4, 550. The ‘n’ number in the
last two examples is the number of the footnote that contains the full citation to the
relevant source. ‘Ibid’ can be used to refer to a source in the immediately preceding
footnote. If the pinpoint reference is the same, use ‘Ibid’ on its own; otherwise include
the new pinpoint reference as well – for example, ‘Ibid 45-6’.
 Language: Use plain English and gender neutral language. Pay attention to your tone
and voice, which should be measured, balanced and objective. Avoid colloquialisms,
grammatical contractions (for example, use ‘do not’ instead of ‘don’t’), slang, verbosity
and emotive language. Be careful to check your sentence structure, and use the
Macquarie Dictionary Australian spelling.
 Grammar and punctuation: Check your grammar and punctuation against the guides
provided by the Macquarie Dictionary at
https://www.macquariedictionary.com.au/resources/view/resource/20/ (for grammar) and
https://www.macquariedictionary.com.au/resources/view/resource/6/ (for punctuation).