Chris Dickman (bio)

A situation like this is fertile ground for the human reflex of bringing order to chaos. So it was that during my apprenticeship as an ink-stained wretch while writing for The Globe & Mail (ambitiously dubbed "Canada's National Newspaper") I'd make a point of using the Globe's own style guide, which I see is now in its ninth edition. However, when later writing for American magazines and book publishers, I had to throw that out the window and adopt the tenets of the Chicago Manual of Style. All while worshipping at the alter of Strunk and White.

Style guides perform a valuable function in ensuring that people adopt a baseline of standard practices. Take the French, for example. They live in a world of social interaction that we'd find baffling—they know when to shake hands or kiss someone on both cheeks. Employing the formal "vous" or familiar "tu" form when addressing people is second nature to them. If they bump into someone they'll excuse themselves, even when it's not their fault. Coming across a lost object on the ground, they will immediately pick it up and place it on something nearby at eye level, to help the owner find it. And so on. The French have learned a standard, shared, agreed-upon way of doing things in a social context that frees them from having to always decide in the moment what to do.

This is exactly the function of style guides. To write well, your ideas need to be wrapped within the principles of correct presentation. Having to ponder whether a colon or semi-colon is appropriate, or if you should employ it's or its, will certainly slow you down. But getting such things wrong can also confuse your readers and undermine the authority of your words.

So my interest was immediately piqued when I heard of the publication of a new style guide from the editors of Yahoo! The subtitle immediately sets out the scope of this 500-page tome: "The Ultimate Sourcebook for Writing, Editing, and Creating Content for the Digital World." Of course, there are no "ultimates" on the Web, with Yahoo's once-mighty directory-based approach to helping visitors discover web sites itself having been marginalized by search- and tag-based approaches. However, it's easy to forget that Yahoo! goes way back to 1994 and remains a popular destination. All those years and page views have not surprising helped its team of writers and editors to gradually evolve a keen sense of what works and what doesn't. What's more surprising is that this wisdom has now been shared. But hats off for this initiative, since the new style guide is a worthy counterpart to its brethren for the printed page.

In fact, I'd be surprised if just about anyone engaged in writing or editing for the Web didn't find this useful—even a wily veteran such as myself picked up more than a few things. And beyond individuals, I could see this being adopted by a site's editorial team to foster consistency. One of the highlights is the second chapter, Identify Your Audience, simply because that's the single most important thing you need to do on the Web and yet it's so easy to overlook. So this section is devoted to various ways to finding out who your audience, or potential audience, is. This is followed by Define Your Voice. Again, just the right topic, in the right sequence—with your audience in mind, how do you make sure the delivery of your message is a fit?

As you would expect, much of the book is devoted to such nitty-gritty as punctuation, abbreviation, capitalization, title treatment, number style and so on, and this is well handled. But worthy of mention are sections on the arcane science of writing from a search engine optimization perspective and a handy compendium of common usage pitfalls. Also welcome is the chapter on creating "engaging" email and newsletters. There's even a short section on U.S law related to online content. A few extracts are available on the book's site, with The Yahoo! Style Guide being available for purchase as of today from the usual online and offline sources. In short, recommended. Or as we'd say in Canadian English: Beauty!

Chris Dickman
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