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Thursday
Apr082010

Style Guide for Web Writing & Yahoo!

DateThursday, April 8, 2010 at 11:02AM

Yahoo is stepping up to fill a huge void in the world of online writing. Their new The Yahoo! Style Guide: The Ultimate Sourcebook for Writing, Editing, and Creating Content for the Digital World is now available for pre-order.

I've ordered my copy. Do you have yours?

Why we need a new style guide for the web

The existing guides weren't written for the online world.

The Chicago Manual of Style is really for books. The AP Stylebook is really for newspapers. PR people adopted AP Style to convince reporters to use their stuff. Marketing people followed the PR people. And AP Style became the default style for business communication because there wasn't anything better.

But the rules of AP Style are in conflict with the needs of business communication online. The Standing Partnership wrote about the conflicts between AP Style and best practices for SEO back in February.

Plus, there are huge questions of style that none of the existing style books address.

Some are simple questions of vocabulary. Is it Web site, web site or website? Is it email or e-mail? Some are more complicated issues of sentence and paragraph structure (more the purview of guides like Strunk & White than Chicago or AP in the print world).

What Yahoo!'s guide needs to succeed

It remains to be seen if Yahoo's guide will be widely adopted — and it will only be really useful if everybody uses it. But so far it looks good for them. They're filling a huge need and they've still got (at least for now) the web clout to make people pay attention.

But for their guide to be widely adopted, it's gotta do a few things really well:

  1. Their rules have to be SEO-friendly.
  2. Their rules have to make sense and not offend the sensibilities of people who know and love both AP and Chicago Styles. They can't break basic grammar rules, etc.
  3. They have to address the major problems online writing has caused, including vocabulary challenges like Web site v. web site v. website, and make us believe their rules are better than the rules we have.

Will Yahoo!'s guide become the new standard?

I think Yahoo! could do all the the things we need. But reading the description on the Amazon sales page for The Yahoo! Style Guide: The Ultimate Sourcebook for Writing, Editing, and Creating Content for the Digital World does give me a moment of pause. It sounds like they're trying to do too much at once.

I need a simple, universally adopted, non-controversial style guide like the AP Stylebook or the Chicago Manual with maybe some basic rules for great internet writing in the vein of Strunk & White.

I don't need another book about SEO or successful writing for the web with a bunch of subjective, changeable suggestions.

So, will Yahoo!'s book be everything we need?

AuthorBridget Reddick | Comment5 Comments |
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