OK, so we know you’ve got style, but do you have the right kind? We’re not talking personal flair here — if you want a great blog, you’ll need to think a little about editorial style.
Your editorial style includes the conventions you use for spelling certain words (email or e-mail? Web site or website? Colour? Theatre?) and the basic rules of grammar and punctuation you follow.
If that all sounds too much like school, it doesn’t have to be complicated. The key is consistency. At the simplest, you can keep a list of common words that have more than one spelling (email, website) and always spell them the same way. Decide if you’re going to use the second comma in “this, that, and the other” and thereafter always do the same thing.
An easier way to handle style is to follow a style guide. Not sure if you should use the second comma? Just look it up.
The AP Stylebook is sort of the gold standard for journalists. The Columbia.edu online style guide is a nice online alternative.
If you use other good resources for editorial style, leave a comment!
p.s. As a tangent, it’s interesting (to me. a dork.) how style changes over time. When I started working on the Web in 1995, not only did my AP Stylebook not include any Internet terms, but I thought that email should be spelled e-mail (”it’s electronic mail, after all — e-mail!”) and website should be spelled “Web site” because “World Wide Web is a proper noun!”
Now that ten years and more have passed, I see email and website as words of their own.
Personally, I appreciate and understand AP style, and use it when I post to my politics blog, Views from the Left Coast (http://viewsfromtheleftcoast.blogspot.com). And yes, I can live with writing e-mail and Web site, even though it seems sometimes clumsy these days. I think maintaining consistency in editorial style is a positive thing and helps protect the integrity of the language.
Hey Tim
Thanks for the writing advice.I have become more aware of my grammar and punctuation since I started blogging.