Celebrating Wired Style
Content-wire shares the lessons learnt from the masters of online writing
11 April 2001, 1 pm GMT
When looking for an online writing guide, I was very much hoping to find something out there that people had already written, something that I could quickly adopt.
But there wasn't much around.
A contributor once volunteered to produce 'writing guidelines', but skilful writing is not enough. I was not sure that the essence of transformation, rather subtle, could be captured then.
Webwriting doesn't need to reinvent the wheel. There are many sets of grammar rules out there, we don’t need no more. Actually we probably need less.
The rationale underlying the principles of Wired Style
One of the reference books that I decided to study for the purpose of refining the art of 'online writing' was 'Wired Style', Principles of English in the Digital Age.
When they published it, Constance Hale and Jessie Scanlon, well navigated and experienced online editors, had decided that they were going to standardize and disseminate to a broader audience their day to day colloquial use of the language, incorporating the technical bias deriving from the topics they handled, that made their magazine Wired so popular.
It is an important piece of reading, that ultimately represents the individual experience, something to learn from and remember when we develop our own individual 'wired styles'.
Content-wire stores Wired Style in the 'religion' section of our library, and recites wired sytled mantras regularly, and encourage others to do the same. Sorry for language purists, its strange times.
A reviewer interprets the main lessons from the book and wrote a few notes. (sorry I did not make a note of who the reviewer was at the time,)
Rule Aversion
"To convey the excitement of technological innovation, web writing should be dynamic and rule averse. It is most effective where the new web-tech jargon based format loses its techie feel, yet retains original sparks of innovation expected from styles molded in the web creators experimental language crucible and expressed now without any dumbing down, but still very much alive and actively pushing boundaries of language and form".
Upon submission of the above sentence, a mix betwen archaich and creative writing, reviewer and editor had a fierce discussion about the punctuation in the sentence above, and decided to take it 'as is' for argument's sake.
Inconsistency
Inconsistency in the interest of voice and cadence is welcome, as is the quirky way tech outfits like to style their own world's names and products, playing with grammar and syntax in the cosmopolitan global village, enjoying the best of cultures and tongues and resisting editorial impulses to filter foreign ideas and phrases.
The Missionary Zeal Of Editors
The sometimes missionary zeal of editors and copy editors staying faithful to print conventions contrasts vividly with the pidgin system that grafts traditional rules of punctuation with a willingness to break rules in the service of free expression.
No Sacerdotal Rules
The book quotes the guidelines of new journalism proposed by Tom Wolfe in 1973 -"there are no sacerdotal rules, not yet in any case. If the journalist wants to shift from from third person point of view to first person point of view in the same scene, or in and out of different characters' points of view, or even from the narrator's omniscient voice to someone else's stream of consciousness.... he does it. For the gluttonous goths there is still only the outlaw's rule regarding technique: take, use, improvise."
Speaking the contemporary cultural jargon of any field or niche, elite, subculture or tribe and writing accurately and with literacy, is a way to get to the people.Writing the way people talk and using the vernacular of the world being written about, is the most immediate way to achieve the above.
The Ten Principles
The first section of the book, that lists the ten 'principles' is in fact the most interesting.
Ther rest is a collection of words 'A to Z' a minigeek dictionary, that by now has been superseeded by the far more comprehensive Oxford Dictionary of Computing and frequent updates thereof.
The first five principles invoked by Wired Style relate to prose, and how to write in an everchanging mediascape of e-mail, glossies, web sites and biz pages, where for example the loose and playful nature of spelling and punctuation in e-mails belies the paradoxically intensely personal nature and immediacy of the new medium.
The second five relate to copyediting style, spelling, punctuation and new terms.
(Download the summary of the ten principles from our documents section)
Wired Style, Principles of English Usage in the
Digital Age by C Hal and J Scanlon
ISBN 0-7679-0372-2
DOWNLOAD THE SUMMARYTENPRINCIPLES OF WIRED STYLE
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