Copy Chemist

If I wasn’t afraid of melting something, I’d light candles in front of my laptop to honor the recent birth of the Yahoo Style Guide’s site and book. To give a sense of how profound this effort is, consider that there hasn’t been such a resource in the history of the web. Wired had a slim, book version that held for a few years, but then there was its recant of the capped “I” in Internet and of the capital “W” for web. It’s own site doesn’t comply, so the debate continues. I happen to agree that the web and the internet have now moved into common usage, so we don’t need to revere them with a capital letter, but it’s a hard habit to break. For years I argued that “Web” was short for World Wide Web, a proper noun, and so the “W” must be capped, and the Yahoo Style Guide still sees it that way.  Some days I almost agree.

Do you care? If you edit web copy you sure do. I patched together a style guide for Turner Network Television during my time there, and there were many burning issues to standardize. Do you have to ® Oscar after every usage or just the first? Did the network want franchise titles to be bolded (looks better) or italicized (correct)? And again, the etnerally unsolvable question of Website, Web site, web site or website?  Is there a comma before the last item in a series? I say a defiant “no”, as does AP, but Yahoo has ruled in favor of the serial comma. That’s okay, they’ve brought together great advice on writing for the web, social media platforms and smart phones. Styleguide.yahoo.com is a wealth of all kinds of useful information on digital writing, from SEO to basic HTML coding. Get links to online resources every writer and editor needs, a handy word list of frequently contentious items (like 3D) and editing 101 tips. You can even “Ask an Editor” and get your burning copy questions answered online.

The Yahoo Style Guide is not just remarkably useful, its existence is a plain relief. It’s good to know that someone  has seen the need for a resource to end the chaos of digital copy and worked hard to fill it. Thank you to all those behind the style guide–a beacon of order in a sea of rogue grammar and haphazard writing practices. There is hope at last!

What’s your favorite grammar gripe, digital or otherwise?

I met a wonderful agent yesterday at the Atlanta Writers Conference, Matthew Elblonk from DeFiore and Co. We were talking about young adult fiction and how when we were kids, there wasn’t such a defined genre. The realm of fantasy always held crossover titles like The Chronicles of Narnia, the Tolkien books and Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea Trilogy. There were the much-loved S.E. Hinton books, The Contender by Paul Lipsyte and Pigman by Paul Zindel.

But by and large, the books assigned in junior high English were adult books that either featured young characters or had enough imagination involved to engage younger readers. For me those were books like A Separate Peace, Lord of the Flies, Fahrenheit 451 and a number of Steinbeck titles. There were also the books with animals for main characters, like Watership Down and Animal Farm, which were fantastical enough to have a child-like quality to them, however layered their meaning.

When it came to choosing my own reading, I recall going from the Little House books to everything by Louis L’Amour and, already an ardent Ray Bradbury fan, Robert Heinlein. These were all adult books with simple, albeit in the case of the sci-fi selections, mind-blowing premises. It was great for a young reader to have to reach for the meaning and references in these books. I think it built a certain reading sophistication early on.

Now young adult readers have a universe of wonderful books to choose from that are written specifically with them in mind. The Harry Potter series, of course, appeals to adult readers as well, as do other series like Twilight. And though younger readers may not always have to reach as far as they would in a book written for an older frame of reference, the engagement they get from books aimed at them delivers a kind of emotional closeness to the story and characters that adult titles don’t always deliver.

Regardless of what we read as younger people,  it’s a period during which what you read literally changes your mind. I wish I could read today with as much absorption and openness. But I’m thankful for the permanent imprint that so much of that great reading left behind.

What were your most important novels as a teen or pre-teen? Have you reread any of them?