The Elements of Internet Style

This preface is taken from the upcoming book, The Elements of Internet Style. Click here to order your copy now.

Preface: What New Rules?

Every year, the Society for Scholarly Publishing brings together the players in the traditional scholarly publishing community—publishers, editors, librarians, scholars, printers, agents, wholesalers, booksellers, and others—to hear about new developments in such areas of concern to them as content licensing, copyright, business usage data, and academic publishing.

The program theme of the 2007 annual meeting: “Imagining the Future: Scholarly Communication 2.0.” Featured speaker: Tim O’Reilly, who coined the phrase Web 2.0. The hot central question behind the sessions: “Is Web 2.0 just a buzzword, or are there real opportunities for scholarly publishing lying beneath the hype? Find out how evolving Internet strategies and technologies can empower you and your organization.” Other presenters included Larry Sanger (Wikipedia/Citizendium), Paul Duguid (UC Berkeley), and David Worlock (Outsell, Inc.).

And this is the traditional publishing crowd. You’re reading this book not a moment too soon.

Copublished with Allworth Press in New York, Elements is the revised version of the award-winning EEI Press book E-What? A Guide to the Quirks of New Media Style and Usage. We’ve partnered to offer insights about today’s new readers and new publishing models, which can be hard to glean on the fly from many different sources.

Mainstream reliance on the Internet as a publishing medium has grown since the early 1990s to influence nearly every segment of society today: churches, small merchants, universities, hospitals, charities, museums, multinational corporations, and newspaper, magazine, and book publishers. Also local, state, and federal government agencies. Also teenagers, nutcases, politicos, pornographers, crooks, and your talented cousin Kathy, a pen-and-ink and watercolor artist.

All of these and more tell their stories, sell their wares, and make their cases on the Web. Thus, to understand what we mean by The New Rules of Creating Valuable Content for Today’s Readers takes a working knowledge of core communication concepts and terms directly related to the influence of the Internet.

Some sound so deceptively familiar that you may still be taking them for granted. Some are so new that you may have been ignoring their new implications as irrelevant to your still-largely-print-based work up until now.

Whatever your particular spot on the new-media learning curve, you need to be aware of the implications of these terms, which have fundamentally altered as Internet use and portable publishing technologies have evolved: literacy, community, user-generated content, conversational media, Web writing style. Information search, access, hierarchy, and usability. Standard American English usage. Editing. Publishing. Reading. Content.

This book’s focus is framed by a handful of essential rules—attitudes, really—that all who aspire to creating valuable content for their audiences will take to heart:

• Keep alive a relentless curiosity about effective ways to craft and present comprehensible, credible, useful messages.
• Show respect for the diverse needs and preferences of the wide world of information seekers by making informed structural decisions that allow multiple avenues of access.
• Strive for a flexible attitude toward linguistic informality and innovation without abandoning the imperatives of correct grammar, consistent style, accurate reporting, clear writing, and user-focused design.
• Stay aware of and open to research on usability, readability, and shifting demographics; and new publishing technologies.
• Accept the fact that readers want help not only finding what’s relevant to them but also avoiding what’s not. Today’s information seekers hate wasting time. An honestly packaged communication agenda is a strategic asset even when it says to some people “not for you.”

Perhaps most of all, work at staving off cynicism. Allow yourself to welcome (or at least keep a wary eye out for) each announcement of the Next Cool Thing coming out of the yearly International Consumer Electronics Show. Accept with as much grace as possible the truth that being a content creator means a life of instability: learning, relearning, unlearning.

Everyday, we make leaps of faith in the power of written and visual communications. We can’t do that if, like Road Runner crossing a canyon on a high wire, we look down and let all the electronica we don’t own, don’t know how to use, and haven’t even heard of intimidate us.

Half of this edition is entirely new and half is extensively updated. All of it offers guidance for setting a consistent, contemporary editorial style that will serve you well in print and online. You may not agree with everything in the newly added analyses of pivotal trends, but you cannot afford to ignore them—or the influence of the Internet on print publishing.

The chapter on Web style goes beyond “write it short, chunk it, and link it” to offer perspective on readying publications for more than one destination. Chapters on maintaining distinctions that still matter and handling new usage encourage you to make decisions that aid readers, regardless of the publishing medium. Letting go of overly complex, counterproductive, outdated rules, and rules that were never truly rules at all, is a part of the editorial decisionmaking process.

The chapter on compiling proprietary style guides encourages you to follow intelligent precedents and trust yourself to make your own exceptions. Those responsible for making proprietary style decisions when the traditional authorities are silent or disagree are contributing to the new Standard American English lexicon—so we recommend being able to explain the
rationale for nonstandard style and usage, beyond “we’ve always done it that way” and “nobody remembers why we do it that way.”

We end with an only slightly ironic coda on the future of book publishing. It’s a negotiated settlement between the comfort of static printed content and the undeniable pragmatic pull of e-content. An appendix of useful resources for continuing education follows, and an index to aid quick lookup. But quite honestly, this book is meant to be read thoughtfully, critically—not hit-and-run.

And to that end, in this book, we’ve chosen to honor legitimate style alternatives in directly quoted excerpts, as well as other proprietary style preferences, even when they differ from EEI Press and Allworth Press style. So in a quotation that uses British English style, we do not alter that convention of placing a comma outside the ending quotation mark. And if one company does
not use a comma before Inc. in its name, we do not insert it, but if another company does, we retain the comma. This means that skimming readers might think they’re superficial inconsistencies. Well, they are—but it’s deliberate. In a book about the influence of the Internet, this seems apt. Web users encounter various Englishes, even on the same site, if the content comes from authors who have US, Canadian, British, and other kinds of native English.

In general, targeted-information seekers are less interested in utterly consistent mechanical style than editors believe, as long as treatments are nonintrusive and as consistent as possible within a given micro-context. Waffling and decisionmaking nonstandard in any widely used style, in the same document or across a series of closely linked items, are what rattles reader confidence in a publisher’s professionalism and the value of content.

An integral element of Internet style—of all forms of publishing, really—is us. Idiosyncratic, emotional, one-of-a-kind human beings, we’re still interested in the sound of the human voice, the extension of a helping hand. More than ever, in the Age of Information Sharing, we are in the game of clear communications together. We’re grateful whenever a message seems meant for us.

The medium may be the message du jour, but publishing ultimately devolves upon labor-intensive investments of time, attention, care, trust, wit, technical skill, judgment, common sense, and—so we like to think—goodwill. We still seem to have an awful lot to say to one another, don’t we? Let’s continue the conversation. Send a note to eye@eeicom.com and we’ll let you know when we launch the companion Web site to this book.

—Linda Jorgensen, for the Editors of EEI Press
    Spring 2007

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