Unhelpful

I wanted a style guide for best practices and consistency.  Existing style guides were always either incomplete or large, so that finding the information I needed on one page wasn’t possible.  This applies particularly to the All Articulate Sounds and Letters project, which as of this writing is still set to private while I work on it.  This is for my reference, but there’s no compelling reason to set it to private.  I’m not going to retroactively apply any of this to writing before 2009.

AS&L chart specifics:  Number without preceding 0, period, two spaces, artist (refixing the “The” removed from my process), one space, title in quotes, in proper title case (a helpful but imperfect tool).  Single spaced, one indent, not blockquoted.  Example:

46.  Example Artist “The Title of the Song”
47.  The Second Example Artist “Song Name Goes Here”

General Writing

Separate sentences with double spacing.  For whatever reason, Wordpress and today’s browsers seem less likely to ignore it, though I’m not sure how this is possible, given how HTML is often formatted.  Screen readability needs are different than print readability needs, and double spacing still looks best to my eye.

Acronyms:  Prefer the form without periods (US rather than U.S.) . Make an attempt to use the first instance of an acronym that isn’t prevalent in current general, non-technical English as follows:

Only use in an article:  Recording Industry Association of America
First use:  Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA)
Subsequent use:  RIAA

British spelling:  Sometimes I prefer it, sometimes I don’t; get over it.  I’m fond of the +u words, such as behaviour, but colour seems slightly too affected.  Catalogue, on the other hand, seems correct no other way. +ise never seems right:  realize over realise.

Colored text:  Avoid in almost any case.  Old articles are full of this, and required a lot of correcting for a light background.

Ellipses:  Use sparingly…  preferably with an pre-composed ellipses character.

Emphasis:  The preferred method of emphasizing text is with italics, rather than with bold text.

Links:  Link in context, rather than specifying the user to click, or click here, or any other horrid construct.

Numbers:  Generally, in general text spell up to ten, consider spelling up to twenty if it’s not awkward.  Always use digits for statistics, figures, and technical passages.

Parentheticals:  Use sparingly, and consider using an em dash—without spaces—instead.

Possesives of words that end in ’s’:  Neither James’ or James’s is authoritative.  Neither of them look good, either.  Damn you, English!

Quotation marks:  Use normal quotation marks, only.  Wordpress changes them to smart quotes.  To quote within a quote, use single quotes, and always make sure there’s a space between an apostrophe or single quote and a double quote.  “Like ‘this’ ”

Closing quotes:  Use the technical style of closing a quote before a period, not the literary English style of putting the period in the quotation.

Technical style:  She said “that is fascinating”.
Literary English style:  She said “that is fascinating.”

Citations

Italics:

Titles of books:  Norman Davies’ Europe:  A History
Titles of movies:  Elias Merhige’s Begotten
Titles of music albums:  My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless
Titles of periodicals:  Issue 261 of The Wire
Titles of television shows:  Steve Carell in The Office
Titles of videogames:  Atari’s Klax

Quotes:

Titles of articles, papers, or single-article web pages:  … discussed by Scott Jennings’ in “Broken Toys”
Titles of songs:  “Glassblower”, by Download.

Special cases:

Quoting lyrics:  “The mescal worm would turn to Mecca / and squirm towards the door”.  Avoid capitalization at the start of lines unless it opens a sentence.