#stylebooks

Wednesday Writing Tip — Stylebooks, Part 7: Admiring MailChimp

MailChimp, the e-mail marketing service, has a goofy name and the most sensible stylebook The Artisanal Grammarian has yet encountered.

The MailChimp Content Style Guide says everything the company publishes should empower, respect, educate, guide, and speak truth. To those ends, it says, all content should be clear, useful, friendly, and appropriate.

Seems simple, doesn’t it?

That simplicity is the style guide's strength. It focuses on broad principles rather than a maze of shalts and shalt nots. “Write like a human,” it counsels. “Don’t be afraid to break a few rules if it makes your writing more relatable. All of our content, from splashy homepage copy to system alerts, should be warm and human.”

The “Commas” section of the style guide specifies the use of the serial comma (a comma before the coordinating conjunction in a series of three or more items, as in “red, white, and blue”).

“Otherwise,” the section continues, “use common sense. If you’re unsure, read the sentence out loud. Where you find yourself taking a breath, use a comma.”

The Artisanal Grammarian wouldn’t streamline comma usage rules quite that drastically. But, well, one could do a lot worse. — Illustration of chimpanzee typing (presumably in a clear, useful, friendly, and appropriate manner) by New York Zoological Society, via Wikimedia Commons

Wednesday Writing Tip — Stylebooks, Part 4: Yahoo!, We Hardly Knew Ye

The Yahoo! Style Guide looks impressive on The Artisanal Grammarian’s desk, a 512-page monument to hubris.

Not so long ago, Yahoo! reigned as a prince of the World Wide Web. In 2008, it spurned a buyout offer from Microsoft, sneering that the $44.6 billion bid “substantially undervalues” the company.

In 2010, it published a stylebook that bespoke its pride and ambition. The subtitle says it all: "The Ultimate Sourcebook for Writing, Editing, and Creating Content for the Digital World."

The book addresses punctuation, spelling, and the other usual subjects. It also imparts wisdom about upgrading old-fashioned print communication skills to keep pace with the brave new Web.

“Identify your audience,” it instructs. “Define your voice. Construct clear, compelling copy. Write for the world.”

Here’s how the Yahoo! editors construct clear, compelling copy by cutting clichés. Old: “The bake sale earnings have been terrific, but they’re just a drop in the bucket toward our goal of sending the class to Space Camp.” Upgrade: “The bake sale earnings have been terrific, but we need a lot more money to send the class to Space Camp.”

Wow.

Yahoo! just sold itself for $4.8 billion. Unused copies of the stylebook (list price $23.99) sell via Amazon for $5.99. The companion website has long since evaporated.

Wednesday Writing Tip — Stylebooks, Part 2: The Difference Between a Rule and a Style

It’s a rule of grammar that you shouldn’t use “host” as a verb. Right?

And that you use an italic font for the name of a book.

And that “e-mail” should be hyphenated.

And that you insert a comma before “and” or “or” in a series of three or more items, as in “red, white, and blue.”

Right?

Wrong.

All of those are style preferences, not grammar rules.

Style amounts simply to consistency. There are good arguments for and against that comma before “and” or “or” — known as the serial comma or Oxford comma. Style guides simply choose one or the other and say, "We'll do it this way." The Chicago Manual of Style favors the serial comma. The Associated Press Stylebook doesn’t.

Chicago hyphenates “e-mail” (although that may change with the next edition); AP doesn’t. Chicago puts book titles in italic. AP puts them in regular (roman) type with quotation marks around them.

AP, in fact, doesn’t use italic at all, supposedly because some newspaper computer systems won’t transmit it. The Artisanal Grammarian was planning to say something snarky about antiquated technology until he remembered that he would be posting this on Facebook. Which won't print italic.

And the venerable The Elements of Style, beloved by generations of literary types, considers “host” a noun, not a verb. Of nouns that have been verbified, it grumbles, “Not all are bad, but all are suspect.”