Introduction
Welcome to the latest instalment of the Red Pony Express. Winter has arrived here in Melbourne, bringing with it some foggy mornings, plenty of leaves in the gutters and the smell of red gum burning in fireplaces at night.
In this issue we look at style guides—why you should have one and what they are used for. As you will see, a style guide is an indispensible tool for any organisation, but equally as important is a process of engaging the people responsible for implementing it with its initial development.
In another article we explore the vagaries and controversies of semicolon usage. And finally, we revisit George Orwell's classic essay from 1946, 'Politics and the English Language'. As always, we hope you enjoy reading.
Regards,
Peter Riches
Principal Consultant, Red Pony
Developing a Style Guide
A style guide is a useful tool (and, for a professional organisation, an indispensible one) for establishing the acceptable writing style or tone of documents as well as their physical appearance.
A style guide isn’t a design brief and it isn’t a grammar primer. Such documents are valuable in their own right, but the benefit of a style guide is in setting out the acceptable, agreed practice for a specific organisation when its members put pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard).
So what sort of information should be included in a style guide?
• Correct spellings for proprietary terms
• Rendering of acronyms and abbreviations
• Terms to be avoided
• Words that should be hyphenated
• Which templates to use for different types of documents
• Numbering conventions for headings
• Capitalisation style
• Caption style and content for tables or illustrations
• Punctuation of numbers
… and any other language or document conventions specific to your organisation.
Sometimes it is the most basic things that need to be recorded in the style guide. I have reviewed a document where the client’s company name was written three different ways within the space of a few pages.
Of course, the hardest part of the process of developing a style guide is to get people to follow it.
You can employ tactics ranging from persuasion to compulsion, but a style guide is more likely to be used by staff if they have had some input into its evolution.
A set of rules handed down from on high that tramples over all the existing conventions is unlikely to have much traction. That’s why a credible consultative process is advisable. It doesn’t have to be an endless to-ing and fro-ing as people argue over which words must be capitalised—just so long as everyone gets to have their say.
At the end of the process, however, someone has to make the final decision and everyone else has to abide by it.
It’s a waste of time when meetings keep degenerating into disagreements about punctuation in a list or to what extent headings should be capitalised. A clear style guide puts an end to these interminable arguments before they start.
That’s not to say that once it’s finished it’s set in stone. Think of the style guide as a document you can add to when new problems arise, but try not to make it a battleground for addressing already settled issues.
The Semicolon
The late satirist and iconoclast Kurt Vonnegut hated semicolons. Hated them. Thought they were show-offy, unnecessary and served no purpose that couldn’t be fulfilled by a comma or a full stop. His underlying point was a very sound one—keep your writing clear and simple—but I don’t know that it was necessary for him to throw a subtle and elegant punctuation mark under a bus for the sake of it.
You don’t see a lot of the semicolon these days, which is a pity; but it’s remarkable how much greater clarity can be brought to a complex sentence with the judicious application of a semicolon.
So when do you use it?
1. When you have a long list that contains a lot of comma-separated items and you would otherwise be drowning in a confusing sea of commas.
Innovative popular music movements often originate in busy port cities such as Liverpool, England; Seattle, USA; and Marseilles, France.
2. To make a break that’s stronger than a comma but not as absolute as a full stop.
I can’t foresee a resolution to the situation; we’ve reached a stalemate.
These could be regarded as separate sentences, but we want to preserve the logical internal link that connects them.
The semicolon is just the man for the job.
Politics and the English Language
In 1946, George Orwell wrote one of the most prescient and influential essays, 'Politics and the English Language’. In it he asserts that lazy writing prevents critical thought and ultimately leads to a corruption of political life.
His view is one that requires little modification to apply to writing in wide use today: vague expression hides meaning from the author as well as the reader; use of abstract words prevents precise thought; fuzzy language can be used to conceal an often ugly reality (from ‘negative growth’ to ‘collateral damage’).
Orwell cites a passage from the beautiful King James translation of the Book of Ecclesiastes (9:11):
I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.
and puts it into what he describes as ‘modern English of the worst sort’:
Objective considerations of contemporary phenomena compel the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.
So why write like this? Sometimes it’s to seem clever and well-informed and bamboozle an audience; sometimes it’s just to obscure lies or to mask the absence of intelligent content.
Orwell offers six points to guard against this kind of mendacious usage.
1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.
3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.
Words to live by…
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