Phil Gons

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Writing Standards for the Web

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The Yahoo! Style GuideIs it e-mail or email, Internet or internet, Web site, Website, or website? In a new book that deals with standards for writing online, Yahoo addresses these questions and many more. Coming in at 528 pages, The Yahoo! Style Guide: The Ultimate Sourcebook for Writing, Editing, and Creating Content for the Digital World is available for pre-order from Amazon for $14.84 and is scheduled to ship on July 6. Some of the content is also available online, as well as supplementary content not available in the book.

Standard guides like The Associated Press Stylebook1 and The Chicago Manual of Style will remain useful and worth consulting. But there’s a lot these tried and true guides don’t cover, and I find them to be a tad dated when it comes to keeping up with the fast-paced world of the Facebook, Twitter, blogging, etc. For example, AP just recently switched from Web site to website.

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  1. The new 2010 edition isn’t available at Amazon yet. [↩]

The Passive Voice Should Be Avoided, Right?

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The Elements of StyleLike most of you who have taken classes with teachers who provided grammatical and stylistic critiques of your papers, I was told to avoid the passive voice as much as possible. Yet I was never really completely convinced of the notion. The Greek New Testament is full of passives, I rebutted, and a grammatical active may be a semantic passive (yet these, strangely, never got marked as improper). I just never felt like the case against passives was convincing. It was more of an unquestionable rule of proper writing style.

But not everyone is afraid to question this prevailing notion. I just read a scathing (understatement!) review of Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style that addresses the issue of passives, among other things. It was written by Geoffrey K. Pullum, who is the head of linguistics and English language at the University of Edinburgh.

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