[WEB4LIB] RE: "Style" sheets

[K.G. Schneider]

The most important reason to have style guides is to predict and eliminate
quagmires in advance, and to corral, if not kill, decisions made by caprice
(or in some cases, head trips). 

It's good to have at least three guides:

1. A formal guide, such as AP, APA, or Chicago
2. An in-house guide, for exceptions, expansions, and clarifications
3. A preferred dictionary

On #1, Jim, sorry about that flack who specified AP, which has very
specialized uses, but it's good to have a guide at all. If you are producing
a lot of blogs, RSS feeds, and newsy content, *do* look hard at Associated
Press (which is also a very readable style guide). 

On #2, whenever you create a local exception, try hard to consider first why
it is justified. Ask yourself how hard writing a simple paragraph should be.
It may well be that it needs to be harder than average (and don't
overestimate how hard it is to write a simple paragraph), but at least go
through the motions. (Many of our local rules and exclusions were
contributed by staff who reached a certain nausea factor with some hackneyed
phrase or convoluted construction.) 

I read one academic style guide that specified APA or Chicago, as if they
were interchangeable. That's pretty much like saying do the freestyle (pun
intended).

I am intrigued and encouraged by Wired's justifications, though in terms of
the trade-off in what it would cost to make the change, until Associated
Press changes its ways, or unless we see this pattern repeated in other
major publications (preferably publications a little less Day-Glo), we'll
still use "Internet." We'll stick with the hated "e-mail" for the same
reason, though when we get global remove-and-replace, we'll definitely
reconsider the latter. (Or should that be "lat-ter?")

Karen G. Schneider
Director, Librarians' Index to the Internet
http://lii.org/ kgs at lii.org
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