Tag: style guides

Dreyer’s English: thoughts

I first encountered Benjamin on Twitter, not long after I joined the site. I don’t remember how it happened. However, I have seldom been so lucky to have made someone’s acquaintance in any kind of reality.

We’re of an age, he and I, and we both love words and language. When I found out his job title, I was floored. Someone with THAT kind of status in publishing would take time to chat with me? I’m a nobody from a blink-and-you-miss-it-but-we-do-have-one-flashing-red-light-at-the-main-intersection village, and he’s from NYC. (Via Long Island, where my dad’s younger brother used to live and work. So there’s that connection.)

However, Twitter is something of a leveling field. Like tends to find like, if like works at it hard enough, and soon I’d stumbled into Editing Twitter.

And of course, in Editing Twitter we love to talk about usage manuals and style guides and who still thinks Strunk & White is useful.

And of course, when word got out that Benjamin (I cannot bring myself to call him “Ben,” nor will I ever, I suspect) was writing a book about English, the denizens lost their collective mind. Genteelly, to be sure.

And so (yes, three paragraphs beginning with “and”—do I look like I care?), when the reviews started coming in, we read them with as much relish as we had the book. Or at least that’s how it began. The relish was a bit off after the first few. Some of the reviewers seem not to have read the book at all; others are of the peeververein variety, looking for anything to skewer as an error. It’s silly, and it does the book (and its intended readers, that “self-selecting” group—as if that’s a bad thing) a disservice.

As I tweeted last night, if you didn’t catch the playfulness in the typography on the dust jacket, you’re unlikely to catch a lot of other things, too. The nose-in-the-air tone of the subtitle, “An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style,” is another clue to the tone of the contents, when taken together with that playful typography. Naturally, Benjamin is confident in his stylistic stance. He’s spent decades steering Random House’s editorial staff, overseeing thousands of books. He also knows that there is room in style for variation. And on top of that, he has a delightful wit that sparkles on the page. He isn’t afraid to lay out his preferences, copiously annotated with footnotes that are worth the price of admission. (Someone else found another point worth that price. Wonderful! There’s a lot to be happy about in this book.)

If you’re expecting dryness such as what’s found in your grandma’s style guides, you’ll be disappointed. If you’re expecting that you’ll agree with everything between the book’s covers, again, you’ll be disappointed. (I already knew that we disagree about exclamation points. I bought the book anyway.)

Should you read reviews? Sure. Should you pay attention to them? Maybe. Should you read between the lines in an attempt to figure out what axe is being ground? Probably.

Should you get this book?

Absolutely. Even if you love your Strunk & White. (Perhaps even because you do.)

Thought for the day, July 25, 2018

“A great deal of modern-day grammar confusion stems from people not understanding the role of style guides. Their rules are not meant as definitive statements on what’s right or wrong. They simply work as playbooks to be followed by anyone who wants to follow them. But the rest of us are not bound by them–a fact some people fail to understand.”

June Casagrande, The Joy of Syntax: A Simple Guide to All the Grammar You Know You Should Know

(I will add that I don’t call the contents of style guides “rules.” I call them “guidelines.” Furthermore, I usually say that unless one is paid to follow a particular set, one need not follow any at all–unless one wants to make an editor very happy. Run wild, run free!)

A Storify from last year: “Building a Reference Library”

Yes, I know that Grammar Day is coming (March 4!), but a friend and former co-worker sent me this link a little bit ago with the comment that it might be “a good lead-in blog before ACES [national conference] this year.”

And indeed, it is. I won’t summarize here, because this is a Storify and therefore comprises numerous tweets (some from me!), making it already nicely chopped into bite-sized pieces for easy consumption. (That’s consumption as in “eating,” not consumption as in “tuberculosis.” Let’s be clear about that.) I dare not forget to thank Gerri Berendzen for collecting and Storifying the tweets for posterity.

Thank you, Steven, for suggesting  this and providing the link. It’s in my bookmarks, along with dozens of others. I hope some of you will decide it’s worth keeping, too.

 

“Building a Reference Library: An #ACESchat Storify“

When style guides conflict

And they do, quite often.

My current project uses APA (also called, colloquially, “science”) style. Now I’m a CMoS gal, and I know AP pretty well, but even when I had to write reference papers in APA style for my most recent degree work, I didn’t run up against this particular guideline that’s driving me bats.

More bats than usual, that is. Continue reading “When style guides conflict” →

A look at my bookshelf

Sometimes people ask me which books I use for my work. I figure everyone knows by now that I’m a Chicago Manual of Style 16th edition kinda gal when it comes to style, but what about other books?

I love my Encarta World English Dictionary, but honestly I don’t use it for my work. For that, I rely on the online Merriam-Webster entries. My reasoning is pretty simple. M-W is an established name in the reference world. Additionally, CMoS recommends M-W’s Collegiate Dictionary first, followed by Webster’s New World, American Heritage, Oxford University Press, and Random House. Encarta doesn’t have the same reputation (yet, anyway), despite it being the database used in MS Word. (Yep. When you click on the dictionary function within Word, you get Encarta entries.) For just browsing a hardcover dictionary, though, I adore my Encarta. (I do that. What? Why are you looking at me that way?)

I also have copies on my shelves of the New Oxford Style Manual (for UK usage), the Merriam-Webster Dictionary of English Usage, the Oxford Companion to the English Language, Chambers Dictionary of Etymology, and the Cambridge Dictionary of American Idioms. Oh, and I also have that 2012 edition of the AP style manual for the day job. My copy of the MLA style guide is one edition behind, and I’ve never had cause to use it, but I keep it around anyway. One never knows when one might need it. If I end up editing something that requires the current version, I can get help at the Purdue OWL site.

Here’s a photo for you to peruse at your leisure. I like having my reference books within arm’s reach; this sits on top of my desk, to my left. Usually there’s a cat blocking the bottom shelf.

All of this is within arm's reach, just to the left of my workspace.
All of this is within arm’s reach, just to the left of my workspace.