The Missing Website Style Manual
Some industries have a long standing practice of using a manual of style. Journalists in the United States use the Associated Press Stylebook. Literary and academic book publishers in the US use the Chicago Manual of Style (CMOS). The CMOS is their definitive guide for complying to the rules of grammar. The Elements of Style by Strunk & White is an essential manual of style in its own right. For the business world, there’s also The Business Style Handbook by McGraw-Hill. The list goes on. However, I haven’t found one for people who write on their own website.
Why Am I Talking About Writing Style Guides?
I recently listened to an episode of Grammar Girl, as one does. She interviewed two of the editors — Russell Harper and Mary Laur — of the Chicago Manual of Style. It’s episode 1015 for the curious. The Chicago Manual of Style, 18th edition, was recently published on 2024 Aug 15. So Mignon brought them on to discuss how the manual gets updated, and all the nerd details of the changes. The part that really inspired me to write this post, was the rules of capitalization in titles. Some programming languages have a function or method that converts a string to title case. Take the Python programming language, for instance. The Python documentation for the str.title_case() method, says it will return a string “where words start with an uppercase character and the remaining characters are lowercase” [^1]. PHP has the ucwords() function which does same thing. However, this is a simplistic implementation when compared to CMOS and the AP Stylebook. In addition, many content management systems (CMS), don’t validate the capitalization of titles. In order to do so, the style guide rules would need to be encoded into the CMS. Instead it’s left up to the author. The only validation done by a CMS, is when the title is converted to a slug, since it represents the page. It is only checked for uniqueness within the CMS content. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if you could get suggestion back – one based on your chosen style guide – before you save it?
Software developers use coding style guides (sometimes called coding standards) to determine how code should be formatted. It’s a common practice to setup your editor or Integrated Development Environment (IDE) to format your code. Often, it’s configured to reformat your code for you automatically, whenever you save your current file. So it feels natural to me, to want something similar for my prose.
I haven’t written an article for my personal website in a long while. It’s time to get back on track. I need to start writing regularly. Naturally, this feels like a good time to improve my online writing. I find myself wondering – What writing style guide should I use? My gut says Chicago. Maybe you’ll say I’m overthinking things, and that I don’t need one. However, I keep thinking, “I can’t believe that I haven’t using a writing style guide for all this time!”. I’ve just been spilling words on a page, all willy-nilly. It’s worth mentioning that I haven’t actually read any of these writing style guides. Any decision I made on my own would be uninformed. So what do you think, dear reader? Are you an strong advocate for one of them? I’d love to hear your thoughts.
References
[^1]: Python, “Built-in Types” (version 3.10) https://docs.python.org/3/library/stdtypes.html#str.title