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Wired Style: Principles of English Usage in the Digital Age

Monday, April 23rd, 2001 at 10:40 AM Category: Books, Meryl's Notes Blog, Reviews, Tech, Writing No comments

When I began writing articles about the Internet, World Wide Web, and email, I was unsure of how to punctuate or capitalize such words. Checking the dictionary was fruitless because the words hadn’t made it there. I sent an article draft to my sister, my second pair of eyes and a former journalist.

She responded, “You must go buy this book: Wired Style.” Good little sister that I am, I did as she commanded. Immediately, I used the book and it helped me through a few entanglements.

Later, I wrote my first article on grammar and used the book and its companion Web site as the primary source. The article was both well received and disliked.

Most readers were grateful to have someone clarify how to take care of these techie words. But some were horrified that I used such a reference instead of the Chicago Manual of Style or other old standard.

Wired’s introduction indicates that it’s “…intended to complement those guides by digging into questions that writers and editors confront daily – questions of style and substance that Chicago and AP (not to mention Strunk & White) don’t even imagine.” The others didn’t even address the issues I confronted while writing my article.

But would this be the stylebook for everyone? Many companies don’t use it since they don’t agree with Wired’s choice of word usage. For example, the infamous “email.” “Wired Style” says it should be “e-mail.” Many are against typing an extra keystroke for the hyphen. Even ibizhome uses “email.” Wired states “Web” is capitalized when referencing the Web, Web sites, Web pages and so on. On ibizforum, we use “web.”

The book can not only be used as a style guide or reference, but also as a digital glossary. It includes ASP, grok, IP, MIME, push and more. Other interesting words are “Pong” and “Tetris.” Yes, they’re talking about the addictive games.

The book lists ten principles for writing well in the digital age. Five relate to prose style and five cover copy-editing. Principle #2 encourages the writer to play with voice. Personally, I like the casual, first-person articles. They’re easy to read and enjoy.

Someone asked, how do we punctuate around smileys ? Smileys are made of punctuation marks. If the smiley is at the end of the sentence, it could be confused with a period, question mark, or exclamation mark immediately after it. Typically, I add a space after the smiley. “Wired Style” had a smiley at the end of a sentence and the period came immediately after, like so . It’s legible, but what if it’s a short smiley;)?

I think it depends on Principle #1: The Medium Matters. In an informal email using less strict grammar and style rules, I leave out the sentence ending punctuation mark. If a bigwig national magazine wants an article, then I’d ask for their rules. Make the decision based on the medium and the audience, and then be consistent.

This is a good book to have in your library, especially for techie writers. The definitions are useful, but there are free web sites like Webopedia to help. I don’t recommend using this as THE digital style guide, but it will help you create one. The most important thing is be consistent throughout your writing or web site.

Title: Wired Style
Author: Constance Hale and Jessie Scanlon
Publisher: Broadway
ISBN: 0767903722
Date: December 1999
Format: Paperback
Pages: 208
Price: Amazon Marketplace: $2..11