The Yahoo! Style Guide: Writing and Editing for the Web was published earlier this month. If you write for online publishing, it’s well worth a look. (The website, linked above, is also a good resource to bookmark.)
What’s that? “What’s a style guide, and why should I care?”
A style guide is a set of guidelines or standards covering issues such as language use, spelling, or punctuation. They help settle issues when usage “rules” don’t have a clear answer.
For example, should it be “web site” or “website?” “Home page” or “homepage?” How exactly should I organize and format a collection of citations? A good style guide can help you answer those questions.
Organizations often use style guides to ensure that all of their publications are consistent.
Here are some other good style guides, each targeting a different publishing area:
And if you’re writing for academia, you’ll want at least one of these:
I’m all in favor of style guides. But I don’t find Yahoo a credible authority on spelling, grammar, punctuation, or language use. Its own writers can’t figure out if it’s “website,” “web site,” “Web site” or something else. See http://terriblywrite.wordpress.com/2010/04/09/is-it-website-web-site-or-web-site-who-knows-not-yahoo/ Every day they make some of the most egregious mistakes on the Internet. If they can’t (or just don’t) follow the style guide, why should I trust it? I’ll stick with AP. — Laura (at http://terriblywrite.wordpress.com)
Laura,
Thanks for the comment. You raised a great point, but is how well an organization follows it’s own style rules the best criteria for judging the value of a style guide? (Just a thought: I’d be interested in seeing an evaluation of how well the AP does on that metric.)
Given the amount of content that Yahoo creates in a day, coming from dozens of different business units, and probably hundreds of different content creators, it’s not surprising that they saw the mish-mash of style decisions on their own sites, and decided that they needed a style guide. Now comes the hard part: getting everyone to adhere to it!
There’s no comparison between the AP content and the content that Yahoo’s writers and editors produce. You just won’t find the quantity of errors in AP content that you see on Yahoo.
Yahoo has had a style guide for many years, and it has never been able to get its folks to adhere to it — heck, it can’t even get them to proofread or edit their content. So, what does it say about its style guide? Maybe it’s too difficult to follow; maybe it doesn’t contain the info writers and editors need. Maybe they don’t subscribe to its scriptures. And certainly there’s no management support for it; if there were, there would be some consistency not just within business units, but across them, too.
The question remains: Is it the style guide itself at fault? In this case, I don’t think there’s enough information to reach a conclusion.
But based on my past experience, my gut says it’s an enforcement problem.
At any rate, you need to find a style guide that meets your needs.
It’s probably a bit of both. I’ve seen writers reject parts of a style guide that were too complicated or convoluted to follow (like the rules for creating the possessive of proper nouns ending in S). Or refuse to use other guidelines that they disagreed with. Or were unaware of the full contents of a style guide because it was too difficult to use and find information.
But enforcement is obviously a big problem at Yahoo, too. My fear is that readers will think that Yahoo is the expert in writing and therefore will believe that its online content provides examples of the correct way to write and will follow its example.
The “OWL at Purdue” website (Web Site??) is a good go-to for Academic writing.