Specifics
Follows a set of rules to which I try to adhere as a matter of style and clarity. Most of these guidelines have been adapted from the Oxford University’s New Hart’s Rules or the Chicago Manual of Style, with some notable influences from other sources noted below.
For no particular reason, they are arranged in alphabetical order:
Colon:
Colons may be used preceding a series, a subclause, or an example. When a subclause or an example is a complete sentence, we capitalise the first letter of the first word only. A colon may be used to introduce a quote block, in which case no quotation marks should be used; however, it should not be used for introducing a quotation into a sentence. A comma and the appropriate quotation marks should be used instead. This is contrary to the French usage which permits unbalanced guillemets when a colon precedes direct speech.
Diälogue
There are two primary methods of indicating direct speech or diälogue, not including the industrious quote block used for long-form citation in journal articles. The primary method is through the use of quotation marks, whether single or double; the second is by starting direct speech on a new line, preceded by an em-dash and followed by a carriage return.
It is the second which I would prefer to use, but I remain for now in oscillation between that and the more common usage of quotation marks, depending on the style and kind of writing. When quotation marks are used, I follow the New Hart’s guidance and first level quotations are always in single-quotes. For those unfamiliar, the second of the above methods is exemplified in the two following passages.
– Ne touchez pas à cela, dit-elle à l’adresse d’un grand dadais qui approchait ses doigts d’un galvanomètre balistique.
– Qu’est-ce que vous marmottez, cousine ? s’esclaffa-t-il. Parlez plus fort, je ne vous ai pas entendue.
– Ne touchez pas à ce galvanomètre, dit-elle en poussant sur sa voix. Je vais vous proposer des échantillons réservés à la lecture.
Le grand dadais haussa les épaules.
– Oh, je voulais simplement voir comment ce bazar fonctionne ! De toute façon, je ne sais pas lire.
Le contraire eût étonné Ophélie. La lecture d’objets n’était pas une faculté répandue parmi les Animistes.
— Christelle Dabos, La passe-miroir, livre 1: Les fiancés de l’hiver
Dennis is running things, but I may break in at any point.
–Leo, can we skip the last part, the science fiction?
–No, Bernd. Past, present, future. Closure. Without this you leave people ready to ask questions.
–We’re avoiding questions?
–Not if they’re intelligent and informed but we have a few critics and wise guys on this panel and I’d like to keep it simple.
–Leo, I have more respect than you for the intelligence of senators. Congressmen are not always so bright but
–Bernd, it’s simple courtesy.
— Carter Scholz, Radiance
Diaeresis,‑es
One place where I break with UK usage and tend to prefer the strictly uncommon is diaresis.
Basically, we have three options for these kinds of words: “cooperate,” “co-operate,” and “coöperate.” Back when the magazine was just getting started, someone decided that the first misread and the second was ridiculous, and adopted the diaeresis as the most elegant solution with the broadest application. The diaeresis is the single thing that readers of the letter-writing variety complain about most.
We do change our style from time to time. My predecessor (and the former keeper of the comma shaker) told me that she used to pester the style editor, Hobie Weekes, who had been at the magazine since 1928, to get rid of the diaeresis. She found it fussy. She said that once, in the elevator, he told her he was on the verge of changing that style and would be sending out a memo soon. And then he died.
This was in 1978. No one has had the nerve to raise the subject since.
— Mary Norris, “The Curse of the Diaeresis”, 26 April 2012
I, too, think that co-operate is pretty ugly. You may have noticed that I tend to over-use the diaeresis. That is partially for the fun of it and partially because of a compulsion to visually represent phonetic information to which I am used in French.1
The diaeresis should be used when a prefix might cause an ambiguously pronounceable letter combination or an unsightly doubling of vowels. It should always be retained when used to disambiguate between vowel combinations that can be pronounced as diphthongs or as a series of monophthongs; this prevents naïf, naïve ever being mispronounced as nafe, knave.
Emphasis
Where scare quotes are sometimes used for emphasis in speech – ie the finger quotes method – in writing one should use italics for primary emphasis and when an entire passage is italicised, secondary emphasis can be had by bolding the relevant word or phrase.
Underlining is unbalance, unsightly, and unfortunately unavoidable in many web contexts. Avoid it for anything that is not a link, and where possible style text so that links are not bright blue or purple if they are underlined.
Best practices for web-based typography are described at practicaltypography.com. Do what Butterick says.
Get, got, getting
I felt like I learned precious little in my university-mandated English classes, but there was one thing that stuck and which I would pass on. Avoid all usage of the word ‘get, got, getting’ as much as reasonable and fluent. When writing, concision is nice but precision is often far more useful, persuasive, interesting, &c.
The word ‘get, got, getting’ is commonly used to replace so many verbs and verb phrases that it holds little or no semantic value in sentences such as, ‘I got a car for my birthday’. When only the most minimal of information is intended to be shared, it can be understood that such a phrase would stand as is; but, in most informational, educational, and entertainment uses such a sentence is so empty as to nearly not exist.
At the very least it begs for attention by trying to be mysterious. It is the kind of sentence that one might use when someone asks you how your weekend was, in order to provoke more questions and stroke your own ego with the attention.
Where possible, avoid the word and its conjugations unless such is your intent.
When it comes to direct speech or renderings of certain regional dialects, definitely ignore this guideline. We want in all aspects of linguistic reproduction to be descriptive, not prescriptive.
Initials and abbrevs
Contrary to common usage throughout the English-writing world no punctuation should be used with initials, eg:
J R R Tolkien sent a copy of the “Lay of Leithian” to his good friend C S Lewis, whose extensive, highly-critical critique in the form of an academic analysis led to a great many corrections and modifications by the poem’s author. (ibid)
The same holds for most common abbreviations and all latin abbreviations, eg am, pm, ie, eg, idem, ibid, &c, &c. Additionally, we follow UK general usage when it comes to abbreviations for words like mister, missus, doctor, professor, &c.
This is for two main reasons:
I write mostly in a monospace font where screen space is often at a premium and dead space is extremely visible in draft copy; and when I encounter a period or a comma in a sentence I expect to either end or begin a clause. Ambiguity can be better avoided when there are fewer false starts and ends in a sentence.Quotes
Quotation should be done using single-quotes for first level and double-quotes for nested quotations. Blockquotes do not require any quotation marks either at the beginning or end.
So-called scare quotes should be kept to a minimum, but my own preference is to use double-quotes for scare quotes or paraphrase and single quotes for direct speech. This is not a standard methodology, rather a personal preference.
Square brackets indicate editorial additions or adjustments (usually for grammar or clarity). Where possible, one should note what kind of changes were made.
We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard[.]
— JFKs famous “Moon speech”, aka the “Address at Rice University on the Nation’s Space”, 12 September 1962
What did Kennedy mean by ‘the other thing’? Will we ever know? The important thing is that Kennedy did not have an interrogative intonation when he said it, so I cannot put the question mark inside the quotation marks. One of the many reasons I prefer single quotes for citing direct speech is that it avoids leaving an unsightly space between words and punctuation that needs to remain outside the quotation.
Semi-colon; and Vonnegut
Here we take Vonnegut’s admonition as the tongue-in-cheek remark that was intended.
Semicolons may be used when a full stop would introduce an excessive rhetorical distance between two related parts of a sentence which could grammatically stand on their own; or it can replace a comma in sentences which might otherwise be run-ons, so as to give the reader a place to pause for breath or to recoup mentally. Rarely, a semicolon can replace a conjunction such as and, but, or therefore.
But my love for Vonnegut has waned a bit since his death. It wasn’t him; it was me. I’ve matured as a reader and writer and my tastes have evolved. That’s not to say I still don’t admire his bibliography, because I do. And he’s still exactly what I’ve always wanted to be: a sneaky, snarky, brilliant thinker who just so happened to turn his thoughts into words and share them with the world.…
[Vonnegut] says that “rules only take us so far, even good rules.”
And, you know what, he’s right. Writing has no rules, at least that’s what I think he was alluding to. For all I know he could be referring to the world at large, and knowing his non-writing interests, I wouldn’t be surprised.
I wouldn’t say I’ve completely embraced the semicolon, but I do think it has a time and place. Sometimes you need something stronger than a comma and weaker than a period, and something that shows your reader there’s a related nugget ahead that doesn’t warrant a full stop because its relation to the previous thought is more sibling than cousin.
— Ryan Peverly “Footnotes: On Vonnegut and the Semicolon” 12 November 2013
Spelling
Most will tell you that such and such way is correct and that such and such aberration is stupid. I wish I could do the same, but unfortunately for my prescriptive nature English is not governed by any generally recognised body of linguistic control. Most culturally-English groups would – it can be supposed – ignore roundly any such body that was set up. This is a symptom of the fracturing of the Anglosphere into several large parts, none of which have a clear or convincing claim to governance of this language.
We might go as far as to call it a language family or a group of mutually intelligible dialects, but we are straying from the point. There are two primary spelling categories, and several groups that range between the two. While both have made some attempts at standardisation within their spheres of influence, neither has any objective claim to correctness and therefore it falls mainly to subjective reasoning to determine which should be used.
While I greatly enjoy using (purportedly] purely phonetic orthographic systems, both the two Englishes fail to attain even the merest modicum of phonetic regularity necessary. So that does not help us choose.
Where phonetics fails, the remaining attribute that a writing system can give is semantic. Reading Mandarin is extremely similar to reading English in that a great deal of unfamiliar words can be approached from a morphological perspective; what the word looks like is based on its meaning. In both languages, the meaning can often be guessed at by analysing the roots visible in its written form. In this, UK English tends to resemble slightly more some of the Greek roots present in some words.
The final and most important factor is æsthetic. I prefer the ‘‑ise’ or ‘‑yse‘ ending to verbs like to synthesise, to analyse, and to chastise for purely form-based reasons: ‘z’ is too sharp. Though most modern UK publications have abandoned the use of ‘æ’ and ‘œ’, I prefer using such ligatures in all writing and will continue to do so. The US spelling tends to delete one of the letters of words that once contained ligatures when “simplifying” words, where the UK retains both letters.
The choice being made, the list of general spelling rules is the same as that of the University of Oxford Style Guide, p 23, including where it differs from the New Hart’s Rules2
To Oxford comma or not to serial comma
Here we follow the suggestion of the New Hart’s Rules3 best paraphrased by Yoda on Dagobah:
Try not! Do, or do not. There is not try.
– Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back
Do, or do not:
- in monospace avoid its use in all cases where it would not be semantically confusing, so as to reduce dead space.
- in published works the publishing house and your editor may have a preference or a style guide: follow it.
Personally, I prefer visually and semantically to let the conjunction do the work of separating parts of a series; however, since this is not always possible I may try reformulating the sentence or reördering4 the items in the series to avoid ambiguity. Additionally, I may avoid using commas to set off appositives – when it is not visually shocking to do so – to reduce the number of functions commas fulfil in a given sentence and ease comprehension when there are several clauses.
Some background
Instinct
In junior year AP Lang, I asked my teachers to let me use U.K. punctuation standards so that I could exclude punctuation from quotations. It bothered me greatly that I could change the text of a quotation without needing to indicate the edit, by changing the punctuation marks at the end to fit my own rhetorical purposes. This still bothers me greatly when writing according to U.S. style guides; so I avoid it as much as I can.
I sort of fell in love with typography and calligraphy (two very distinct disciplines, it turns out) as well in high school. I began to use a fountain pen for school notes, attempted to learn to write in a blackletter script, began using an em-dash, and started to notice kerning.
Chicago, Oxford
When I learned of the Chicago and Oxford manuals of style, I quite rabidly consumed their ideas, attempting to make some sense of the long, rambling, and sometimes incoherent manner in which I wrote at the time.
I was — for lack of a better word — a comma queen. In order to maintain the flow of a sentence, I had taken to heart something which I had been taught at some point in the three years prior: commas indicate pauses in speech. This led to several years of comma-filled sentences interminably appending clauses in order to roughly match the cadence and timbre of speech.
This lasted until senior year Lit class, when my teacher finally called me out on it. So I began looking into how authors write, paying attention to how things are actually done. This is when I began to appreciate some of the finer details of punctuation usage; reading Douglas Adams, Ursula K LeGuin, Madeleine L’Engle gave me grand ideas. Whitman’s touch-and-go influence was there, as was that of Camus and Saint-Éxupery.
It was when I started reading French literature that certain details of the above really came to light. I started seeing a different way of doing things. In French, there is not concept of a run-on sentence; where an Englishman would use a semicolon, the French writer often utilises the virgule – his comma. Where quotation marks are commonplace in English and American writing to such point as to become ambiguous or invisible in extended multi-paragraph monologues while crowding each other in short intercut dialogues, the French writers guillemets are sparely used. Dialogue is introduced with an em-dash and ended with a carriage return. Meta-elements such as the manner of a character’s speech or actions carried out during are quite often given right in the diälogue; the lecteur – the reader – is trusted with the cerebral task of separating diälogue from action.
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For an explanation of this sentence, ask Churchhill about dangling prepositions. ↩︎
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This because I do not currently have access to a copy of the New Hart’s Rules, though eventually this may change. The only difference of note is that of -ise/-yse/-isation rather than -ize/-yze/-ization. The latter is suggested to reflect the Greek roots for some words, but because this is inconsistent and we follow the hyperlinked style-guide’s more consistent spellings. This is also more in line with common British usage. ↩︎
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according to the New Hart’s Rules, 2014: “The general rule is that one style or the other should be used consistently. However, the last comma can serve to resolve ambiguity, particularly when any of the items are compound terms joined by a conjunction, and it is sometimes helpful to the reader to use an isolated serial comma for clarification even when the convention has not been adopted in the rest of the text.” ↩︎
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UK: re-ordering / US reordering ↩︎