Writing principles of this website.
Since my writing style can be somewhat unconventional and idiosyncratic, I thought a Style Guide might be helpful. This is not like the AP Stylebook, to be used as an example. Rather it is an explanation of how I prefer to do things. And one nice advantage of having your own blog is that you can do things however you like.
Plus, and perhaps more importantly, a written style guide helps me maintain my own consistency. If I am going to break the rules, I should at least be consistent about it.
One other note about breaking the rules, many of the rules that I tend to ignore, were put in place to solve space limitations, first newspaper space and later computer memory space. These concerns are no longer applicable, especially to those of us who write on the internet. The rules should be adapted to the new reality. And if others will not do so, that's fine, but I will.
General thoughts on punctuation
Properly deployed punctuation improves the clarity of writing. So I use punctuation beyond the comma, period, and question mark. That is, the dash, the exclamation mark, the colon, the semi-colon, the occasional ellipsis, etc. No, I do not care what they teach in journalism school. Journalism professors cannot even teach students how to convey basic facts. I am certainly not about to allow those sciolists to limit my punctuation choices.
Spaces, periods, colons, semi-colons, and commas
I double-space after periods and colons. Yes, old school, but this business of using a single space after a period crams the sentences together, reducing readability. It is the same with a single space after a colon, it is too tight. Further, the first letter of whatever follows the colon should almost always be capitalized.
I consistently use the Oxford comma, and likewise use serial semi-colons when necessary.
Dashes
Preference for the en dash, – , over the em dash, — . My primary complaint about the em dash is that whenever I see it, it appears much longer than a single m. And even if this is merely an optical illusion, it is just too distracting for my taste.
Preference also for spaces before and after dashes. I see absolutely no reason to mash up the letters before and after a dash. Again, it is too tight.
Perhaps most controversially, a capital letter after a single dash in a sentence. This is not a hard rule, and I will sometimes use a lower case letter after the dash. The point is, I think we should do whichever looks and feels correct in each instance.
For dash delimited asides mid-sentence, I would use lower case after both dashes. But this is something I do not remember ever doing, as I prefer commas for this purpose. Personally, whenever I encounter the two-dash aside, I find myself having to read the sentence with and without the aside. In other words, I find this style of writing distracting. I am not saying that I would never do this, but I avoid it.
Bold and underline
Like my liberal use of punctuation, I am not afraid of using bold and underlining where appropriate.
Silcrows
In the lexicon, I use the silcrow, §, for counting entries.
Quotation marks and titles
I try to minimize quotation marks, and will often instead use italics for titles.
Numbers
I tend to write out single-digit numbers, nine instead of 9. And most often single-word numbers, twenty instead of 20. If it is terribly important, I will write out both numbers and numerals, for instance: Fifty-six (56). The exception is a numbered list, where I will leave the numerals.
Abbreviations
I limit abbreviations as much as possible. Further, I am not an ordinary user of: i.e. or e.g. In fact, when quoting, say from a dictionary, I tend to write these out.
Contractions
Likewise, I am not a big user of contractions. And unless it changes the substance of a quote, I tend to change them back to their primary words.
Paragraphs
For readability, I prefer short paragraphs, and will try to divide longer ones if possible. If this preference would diminish the substance of a longer paragraph, I will leave it be.
Footnotes
For complicated subjects, I can use both casual and formal footnotes. Here is an example of both. Grok offers a good explanation of the two styles, although I confess to fabricating the distinction myself. See: casual footnote
Further, with modern word processing and digital typography, I no longer see a justification for endnotes. If it will not fit in a footnote, you are probably looking at something that should be included within the text or in an appendix. I suppose there are exceptions, but as a general rule, this is true. Your mileage may vary.
Tables
Tables are accepted in the Blogger universe, but you have to create your own. Here are some examples on a single page.
Hyperlinks
I tend to bold hyperlinks so that they are easily seen by the reader. However, this can be distracting if too many are used in a single paragraph. Consequently, I try to be judicious with their use within paragraphs.
Timelines
For some reason, blogging platforms offer only one timeline per blog. But because I do not want some posts and subjects grouped together, I decided that I needed multiple timelines. Therefore, what you see on this website is multiple, nearly identical, blogs linked together in a seamless fashion. It seems to work fine.
It does wreak havoc on the search engines. But since the Google search engine excludes this site, it is not really a problem.