EEI Press editors take a consensus approach to style and usage. That means we derive the rationales for our decisionmaking (including to spell decisionmaking solid) from a number of authoritative contemporary sources. One of them is us.
EEI Press editors wrote a major style guide (The New York Public Library Writer’s Guide to Style and Usage, for HarperCollins) and each month we publish our widely admired (if we do say so ourselves) subscription newsletter, The Editorial Eye (and have been doing so since 1978). We’ve edited, written, and critiqued, hundreds of client publications—and created style guides for them.
We regularly consult major style guides, and we teach editorial seminars for which we do research on style and usage. We hear about the thorniest issues confronting our students, and our colleagues on publishing discussion lists pool educated guesses and linguistic citations. And by the way, we love doing all of this.
That’s not to say we have all the answers, but one thing we know for certain: Among professional communicators, the drive toward error-free, clear, compelling content is as intense as it ever was—and that goes for online and offline content.
Please quote us if you’re trying to make the business case to start or maintain a formal quality control process at your shop: The quality of content has never mattered more, in every medium. That means we have to make good decisions about writing. But we can’t deny the energy that Internet publishing has brought to traditional editorial gatekeeping, which has been characterized, not to put too fine a point on it, as, uh, well, dead.
Style decisions are usually based on exemplary guidelines published by large organizations that do a lot of publishing. Style is not based on the same universally agreed-on set of rules that grammar is. Essentially mechanical in nature, most style decisions are, to put it bluntly, followed “just because.”
A working definition of style is “a customary manner of presenting printed material, including usage, punctuation, spelling, typography, and arrangement.” Carefully, consistently applied style goes a long way toward fruitful, clean prose that does its work in a particular context.
That’s all style is for. Not to worry editors (or give them a truncheon to wield). It’s really for readers. And it works by not getting in the way. And the not-getting-in-the-way happens when we follow the accepted practices of a major style guide.
But nobody follows all the rules in any one style guide. Another definition of style is “the fashion of the moment,” and editorial and design conventions do change over time to reflect what’s going on in wider publishing circles, as well as advances in a specific niche, industry, or professional discipline.
When you have the chance to make a style decision, welcome it! It’s an opportunity to create order. Here are a couple things to bear in mind:
Your choice should reflect the existing personal or corporate style you have been using up until now—if you have one. If you have a more conservative style with a tendency to capitalize words and hyphenate prefixes and unit modifiers, you’ll probably choose to write e-mail rather than email.
The tendency in English (to which there are many exceptions, naturally) is for terms to go from two words (cyber cafe) to a hyphenated term (cyber-cafe) to one word (cybercafe). Where you decide to come down on this continuum is likewise a factor of your existing style, as well as how familiar the term is likely to be to your readers. It’s also a good idea to look around and see how the rest of the world is treating the word (although you won’t find complete agreement, or you wouldn’t have to be making a decision in the first place).
If you’re trying to style a term your own organization or profession has added to the lexicon—for which you can find no precedent—ask the smartest editor you know in your field what makes most sense. Or check with one of the resources in the appendix, or Google your wayward term to learn how other editors and publications in your field are handling it.
Usage simply means the way we’ve agreed to define words the same way and follow the conventions of standard American English so we can understand each other. Usage decisions should be made as consistently as possible and in keeping with conventionally accepted practice, as shown in the newest editions of major dictionaries and usage guides—but, increasingly, that’s easier said than done.
The information revolution is essentially a change in the speed of communication—and sped-up communication affects just about every field of human endeavor. The jargon of technology, and of specialized disciplines aided by it, is entering the mainstream—adapted for nontechnical contexts by low-tech types and, sometimes, seeded with humorous subtexts by the digerati.
A good example is the verb spam, which has crossed over from the hacker’s lexicon into mainstream English. Originally, the verb meant “to crash a program by inputting excessive amounts of data.” It now generally refers to unsolicited, mass-mailed, unwanted e-mail or newsgroup postings. As a noun, spam refers to the actual message or messages—Internet junk mail.
SPAM, of course, is the registered trademark of Hormel Foods Corporation. We found the following bit of advice on the spam.com Web site, which is owned by Hormel Foods:
Use of the term SPAM was adopted as a result of the Monty Python skit in which a group of Vikings sang a chorus of “SPAM, SPAM, SPAM...” in an increasing crescendo, drowning out other conversation. Hence, the analogy applied because UCE (unsolicited commercial e-mail) was drowning out normal discourse on the Internet.
We do not object to use of this slang term to describe UCE, although we do object to the use of our product image in association with that term. Also, if the term is to be used, it should be used in all lowercase letters to distinguish it from our trademark SPAM, which should be used with all upper-case letters.
As if uppercasing SPAM makes it something you’d welcome any more than e-mails from body-part-enhancing vendors. (For more information about how corporations want you to help them enforce their trademarks, see inta.org.)
It’s a commonplace to say “the English language is always evolving,” but the term evolution implies change so gradual that it can be observed only in retrospect—and that’s not what’s happening. The way we use language is changing so fast, coming (new terms and new meanings for old terms) and going (old distinctions), that even the most conscientious editors and writers have trouble knowing when, whether, or how to standardize the variations.
First-ever, one-of-a-kind terms have been coined so fast and spread so ubiquitously that they’ve become clichés—just put an e in front of any word, and it’s understood to mean “something that takes place electronically, most likely through the Internet,” along with I, i, and cyber close behind as prefixes referring vaguely to the Internet and the technology associated with it.
And of course, we have the now almost clichéd variations on extreme (“a radical, intense, barrier-breaking activity”) used to hype everything from extreme sports to “the poetics of extreme engagement,” whatever that is.
The result is new vocabulary that may not show up in any dictionary, which falls into six commonly encountered types:
Eccentric capitalization and punctuation (lowercased initial capital letters, uppercased midcaps, a mixture of both, special characters) are techniques meant to imply that the latest and greatest and cutting-edgiest of technologies are at work. Thus, a program to publicize the achievements of people with handicaps called disAbility, and a reading and literacy initiative tries to inspire enthusiasm by calling itself L!BRARY. Terms are squooshed together in a rush, with or without internal capitalization: GoToMeeting (videoconferencingsoftware), HarperCollinsBusiness (book publisher), WarCraft (e-game). Do we respect the mark owner’s style and include the punctuation no matter where it falls in the sentence? Or do we impose our style on the company’s trademark?
Compounds abound—should it be cyber cash or cybercash? Website or Web site? Bunker buster or bunkerbuster (bomb)? Roller blades or rollerblades? Cell phone or cellphone? Land line or landline?
Abbreviated forms may be quirky but obvious and literal (RLSI: Ridiculously Large-Scale Integration), while others are illogical (WNIC: Wide-Area Network Interface Co-Processor) or just arbitrary XML (eXtensible Markup Language). Other abbreviations have become standard informal shorthand in and outside their niches: social for social security number, SecDef for Secretary of the Defense Department, subprimes for subprime mortgages or lenders.
Back-formations and coinages take root, troubling mainly traditional editors, who bristle at parts of speech swapping out their traditional functions. New terms invented on the fly—like exoneree, someone found to be falsely imprisoned and freed of charges—and nouns used as verbs and vice versa, –ize forms, and otherwise morphed uses can be efficient, lively shorthand. Or not: grow a business, transition to a new job, productivize a capability, gift someone.
Retronyms are created to handle new technologies and products, and new uses of old ones—so that even wireless landlines may ring but cellphones have tones, and inline skates and roller blades must be differentiated from ice and regular roller skates.
Some usage is meant purely to shock, show off, seem cutting-edge. We can’t print off-color examples here; this is a family style guide. But here’s a tame example: By e-enabling our product functionalities we will grow revenue and leverage our brand equity. Wow, e-enabling product functionalities! A lot of that sort of jargon can backfire; it comes to sound as quaintly “futuristic” as “Beam me up, Scotty!”
But innovative usage is also meant to help us take in new ideas and rethink familiar things. We should not be afraid or reflexively disdainful of such writing as this, by Barbara Kingsolver, in an except from her article for Orion magazine (orionmagazine.org), “Stalking the Vegetannual.” She is advocating that people eat fruits and vegetables in season rather than importing them (using much fossil fuel) from around the globe:
In many social circles it’s ordinary for hosts to accommodate vegetarian guests, even if they’re carnivores themselves. Maybe the world would likewise become more hospitable to diners who are queasy about fuel-guzzling foods, if that preference had a name. Petrolophobes? Seasonaltarians? Lately I’ve begun seeing the term “locavores,” and I like it: both scientifically and socially descriptive, with just the right hint of livin’ la vida loca.
Slow Food International has done a good job of putting a smile on this eating style, rather than a pious frown, even while sticking to the quixotic agenda of fighting overcentralized agribusiness.
We’re all in favor of that kind of inventive writing. It’s the stuff that leaves us in the dust and makes the uninitiated feel not only uninitiated but unwelcome that we’ve got to watch out for.
The pace of creating language matched to technological advances sometimes precludes reasoned consideration of how to treat a new form—by the time you’ve figured out whether to capitalize it, how to hyphenate it, or whether to even allow it, you may be describing a technology on its way out.
Does a general tolerance for—if not laissez-faire indifference toward—new usage really reflect a higher speed limit for daily life? Are we engaged in failing to communicate, at unprecedented speed? Are consistent spelling, style, and usage inevitable casualties of the drive toward a multitasking, technosavvy culture with little time for editorial niceties? Does quality control for standard American English matter the way we used to think it did—or matter at all?
Even though we may not be able to cite chapter and verse from a text-book, we native speakers apply “the rules” of grammar and word formation to new terms almost without thinking. And we can look for such patterns of similarity as models for styling unfamiliar terms for our readers.
It’s when we stop to think about neologisms that we start getting confused, like the fabled caterpillar who could walk just fine until someone asked him how he kept track of all those legs. Yet we have to stop and think about terms for which we may have no personal precedent—like incentivize, bioneering, and anti-aliasing.
How is a coinage functioning as a part or different parts of speech? If we allow the verb incentivize (“rewarding workers monetarily for performance,” which is not the same as monetize, which means “to cause to earn revenue”), must we allow the cut form incent? (You will see it, but EEI Press editors implore you to disallow it.)
What are some nearly analogous terms we can use as precedents? We know the term engineering; can we assume readers will understand what the similar term bioneering means? But no—orthographic likeness can be a red herring. The meaning likely to be inferred—“biological engineering”—isn’t correct. And good luck finding a succinct definition, even on the Web. A Google search finally brought us to this gloss by Jon Spayde, in a roundup of groundbreaking ideas listed in Utne Reader:
A bioneer is a biological pioneer, an ecological inventor who’s got an elegant and often simple set of solutions for environmental conundrums. The term comes from the pen of Kenny Ausubel, co-founder of Seeds of Change, a company that conserves and sells seeds for native plants that have been overshadowed by mega-agriculture’s mighty, and unsustainable, hybrids.... Under the umbrella of their nonprofit Collective Heritage Institute, he and partner Nina Simons run the annual Bioneers Conference, where, since 1990, crowds of green problem-solvers have gathered to share their knowledge.
Who are the bioneers? John Todd creates “living machines” that use various plants to carry out simple miracles of waste treatment. Vinnie McKinney’s Elixir Farms gathers and preserves neglected and rare strains of medicinal herbs, particularly herbs used in Chinese medicine. John Roulac researches worthwhile uses for that infamous “weed,” hemp. The list goes on, but what unites bioneers is the belief that in paying attention to how nature works, we can find the best ways to heal nature.
Even when definitions can be found more easily in technical glossaries, will readers know what anti-aliasing means from context, or should we define it at first use as “a process that removes jagged edges from onscreen type and images containing lines or curves”? Or will that seem condescending to knowledgeable readers—and annoy them? How can we know what level of language to use with readers when it’s up to each of us individually to become aware of new terms?
Meaning aside, will readers need a hyphen to know how to pronounce an unfamiliar compound—or a term formed with a prefix that places the same two vowels adjacent, like anti-aliasing—or should we follow instances we find of antialiasing? Will we be thought old-fashioned for not using the solid form? Or puzzle readers to whom it looks like some sort of typo?
We have to make judgment calls about what’s in the best interest of our readers. That’s hard to do if we ourselves—editors and writers and quality control gatekeepers—don’t keep an eye out for new terms. There’s no magical way to do that: You’ve got to go on the Web, look at a variety of documents, and Google terms you’re unfamiliar with. So be careful before editing a term you’re unfamiliar with; what may seem like plain English to you may feel dumbed-down and naïve to the people who practice the art, craft, and Zen (not necessarily in that order) of bioneering, anti-aliasing, and incentivizing.
No special postmodern attitude is required to balance speedy innovation (a cultural inevitability) with consistency that shows concern for reader comprehension (professionally admirable—and a good business move). The trick, of course, is knowing which is which is which is which—and when to make up your own damned rules.
We show a healthy respect for the time and intelligence of readers when we make thoughtful decisions about style and usage—walking a fine line between rigidity and laissez-faire. As Read Me First! A Style Guide for the Computer Industry reminds us, “Consistency is not just some abstract goal to be achieved for its own sake; rather, the intention is to reduce the impact of the mechanics of communication on readers.” But the basics still matter, and most traditional usage distinctions are still worth conserving.
Even though there will not always be a perfectly consistent resolution for every usage quirk in all major linguistic problem categories, please remember that it is the thoughtful attempt that counts, and do not become discouraged. If you do become discouraged, send your questions to us at press@eeicom.com and we’ll try to help. We mean it: When in doubt, do not suffer in silence. Ask for help. Martyrdom is so old-fashioned.
Abbreviations (the generic term) are meant to be a time- and space-saving form of shorthand, but they travel with a fair amount of stylistic baggage and cause editors and readers to do a lot of mental heavy lifting. And though we know that cryptic sets of letters can puzzle and annoy readers, for government, scitech-med, and military communicators especially, it’s not an option to avoid them. Combating an enemy takes knowing its ins and outs, so let’s look at good practices when you must engage it:
Two main types of abbreviations are used to represent a longer name or phrase:
Acronyms are formed from the first letter or letters of a group of words. Acronyms can be pronounced as a word (e.g., ASCII is said as AS-key).
Initialisms are also formed from the first letter or letters of a group of words. But initialisms are pronounced letter by letter (e.g., IBM is said as I-B-M).
Of course, the pronunciation of abbreviations isn’t always so cut-and-dried (and how do you know if you’ve never heard a term pronounced?), and there are hybrids like TIAA-CREF—with the initial letters “T-I-A-A” pronounced separately and CREF treated as a word. CD-ROM is another such term. The more common if inexact term seems to be acronym, so we’ll use it in the following discussions to mean all abbreviations, including initialisms.
That’s one of the first questions that arise with regard to acronyms. Here, as in so many areas, you must apply some judgment. One person’s alphabet soup is another person’s everyday speech. Would you rather be considered condescending or arrogant? Sometimes it seems that those are the choices. In an article for an employee newsletter, it would probably be silly to spell out the name of every department, if everyone in the company routinely refers to human resources as HR, research and development as R&D, or the like. A national press release from the same company should err on the side of caution by assuming that some readers will be stumped by such acronyms.
The high-tech world is rapidly catching up with the military as the number-one coiner of acronyms. Some, such as modem, have already undergone what’s called acronymy—the process by which abbreviations come to be perceived and used as words. If you referred to a component that converts digital signals to sounds and back again as a modulator/demodulator, few people would know what you were talking about. (Modem, by the way, is an example of a syllabic acronym—formed from the first syllables of the basic term, rather than initial letters. More recent examples include pixel, short for picture element, and codec, short for coder-decoder.)
WYSIWYG, on the other hand, is listed in Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, 11th edition, but still written in all capitals—a sign that its assimilation is not yet complete. Today, a computer magazine needn’t bother to define it; some general-interest publications perhaps still should. In a couple of years, though, defining it may be as unnecessary as defining IRS, FBI, or COB.
So what do you do now? Even the editors of the Chicago Manual of Style have been known to say, in answer to questions posted on the manual’s FAQ Web page, “We’re waiting till the dust settles on this one.” Try saying that you’re waiting for consensus to magically emerge next time you’re editing or writing a manuscript for publication, on deadline.
Here’s what to do when you don’t know what to do and the authorities fail you: You’ve got to make a decision, based on what you know about the context and about your readers.
“Know your readers” is the catchphrase in deciding which acronyms to define on first use. Here’s another guideline: When in doubt, spell it out. Even if 90 percent of your readers know what URL stands for, the other 10 percent will be grateful to find out without having to stop and look it up. Of course, the newer an acronym is, the more important it is to define it, unless your audience is a crowd known to be Web-conversant and would see overdefinition as editorial amateurism. (This is one of many times you’ll have to make an educated guess about such matters.)
Is there a difference in how you use acronyms when you’re writing for the Web? The answer is yes. The Web writing chapter describes some of the physical differences involved in reading material in print and onscreen. These differences imply that you should use acronyms sparingly. Your readers may not have time to familiarize themselves with acronyms as they quickly browse, may not encounter the place where they are defined, and may not follow the jump to a definition link. An even more basic reason: Clusters of capital letters detract from readability, in print and online.
When you encounter a new acronym, how do you find out what it means? General-purpose acronym dictionaries run to multiple volumes, are outdated before they’re printed, and are not very useful for defining short acronyms, since anything less than four letters is apt to have a couple hundred possible definitions. It’s better to use a subject-specific reference. See the Resources for Continuing Education appendix for selected online references you may find useful.
In general, you can simplify your life by leaving off articles (a, an, the) with acronyms. For example, IEEE publishes about a fourth of the world’s electrical and computer engineering papers (where IEEE is the Institute of Electronics and Electrical Engineers). If you do use them, you must be aware not only of the acronym’s meaning, but of whether it’s an acronym or an initialism—whether people familiar with the term pronounce it as a word or a string of letters. For example, the acronym SME (subject matter expert) is common in technical writing. Do you use an (as in an S-M-E) or a (as in a smee)? Turns out it’s pronounced smee. URL also takes a—it’s pronounced U-R-L. The conundrum arises with any acronym that starts with F, H, I, L, M, N, R, S, U, or X.
In general, acronyms are written in all caps, without periods. Note, however, that when you define an acronym, the words themselves are not capitalized unless they represent a proper name. Compare WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) with ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange). Sometimes it can be tricky to ascertain whether the term is considered proper; you may see HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) spelled out with or without initial caps. It’s a protocol name, and it should be uppercased.
Obviously, the consensus tack doesn’t work for arbitrary, proprietary terms. You just need to have a good computer dictionary handy—or some bookmarks to specialized glossaries online. Having a friend in the IT department doesn’t hurt. And you’d definitely benefit from creating a personal style sheet (or online style guide) to help you manage the specialized terms you’re most likely to encounter.
As noted, an acronym may eventually be accepted as a word, in which case it sheds its capitals. But some acronyms that aspire to the status of words may find their place already taken—IT (information technology) is unlikely to be written it, no matter how familiar the term becomes.
It’s sloppy practice and potentially confusing to use a single acronym to represent more than one term. If you define IS as “information services,” don’t use it to mean “information systems” as well. Spell out the term that’s less used or less commonly represented by an acronym.
Most acronyms are singular in meaning. You form the plural just as you would for a word—by adding a lowercase s. One CD-ROM, two CD-ROMs. But a few are plural by definition, such as WMD (weapons of mass destruction). Some editors say there’s no need to add an “s” to such acronyms—but will readers “think” plural or will it look as though you’ve made a typo when they see a plural verb with a singular-looking acronym? If you’re making a plural form of an initialism that isn’t written in all caps, use an apostrophe for the sake of clarity, as in abc’s and p’s and q’s.
Abbreviations range from the commonplace (Mr., Mrs.) to the esoteric (kbps). As these examples demonstrate, it’s harder to generalize about the capitalization and punctuation of abbreviations than about acronyms and initialisms. You must be precise, especially when the abbreviation represents a unit of measure. For example, kb stands for kilobit, kbps for kilobits per second; kB stands for kilobyte, kBps for kilobytes per second. (All are measures of speed, just as mph is.)
Like other neologisms, abbreviations are proliferating. Many are informal curtailments of words that go from being used in conversation to being seen in print, such as app for application and sig for signature.
As for defining them, the same guidelines as for acronyms apply. Define any abbreviations that are likely to be unfamiliar to most of your readers. In a technical text laden with abbreviations and acronyms, it may make sense to provide a glossary in addition to or instead of in-text definitions. And remember, a glossary doesn’t have to be the last item the reader sees. If it’s essential to an understanding of the text, put it up front. In a document published on the Internet, you can link each abbreviation to its definition.
It’s easy to say “capitalize proper nouns” and “treat brand names the way the owners treat them.” But trying to follow these rules is far from simple. Is LISTSERV a proper noun? (The answer is yes.) If so, what is its generic equivalent—assuming it has one? (Electronic mailing list.) If a brand name begins with a lowercase letter, what happens when it’s the first word in a sentence? Is there an authoritative source for the spelling and capitalization of brand names and trademarks?
It’s the Internet, also called the Net. It’s not the World Wide Web any longer but the Web. These are proper nouns and should hang on to their capitals, as far as we’re concerned—and that seems to be the mainstream consensus. So when you use Web as a modifier, retain the capital. A location on the Web is a Web site or Web page. But when you use web as a prefix, lowercase it. A person (male or female—sorry, we’re not going to split feminist hairs over this one) who maintains a Web site is a webmaster. A magazine published exclusively on the Web is a webzine (also called an e-zine). On the other hand, your company, my company, and the company on the floor below us can each have its own intranet, so the term is not capitalized.
Capitalization of business names, trademarks, and service marks should follow the owner’s preference. But sometimes that’s tricky to ascertain. In the good old days, you were fairly safe using headline-style capitalization (capitalizing the first letter of each “important” word). Now, lots of manufacturers are using midcaps (capitalizing seemingly random letters inside a name instead of only the first letter or significant letters) and eccentric punctuation to make product names stand out.
It’s not safe to take your guidance solely from other publications, such as computer magazines that review new products. You have no way of knowing how carefully they’ve done their research. Perhaps the best resource for questions of spelling and capitalization of new products is on the Net itself—specifically, on the owner’s site. Announcements of new products should appear there with the names accurately reproduced. In addition, you’ll find “how to contact us” information, so you can follow up by e-mail or phone if necessary.
Many corporate sites publish a legal, copyright, or trademarks instruction page to help users accurately render the marks and names they own (service marks, product names, logos, etc.) and comply with restrictions on their use. In theory, you should be able to trust an owner’s site to represent the spelling and capitalization of its own marks faithfully, but some actually don’t. Design enhancements may disregard strict typographical rendering; for example, on their Web sites, Basecamp project management software is spelled BASECAMP, and on its site E*TRADE also wants to stand tall, with graphic mid-punctuation as well.
You can try e-mailing the public relations, marketing, or legal department for an authoritative answer when editorial and graphic treatments are inconsistent—if you have that kind of time. Many editors agree that, when a common keyboard character will accomplish a stylized spelling, it’s easy enough to honor the preference. But editors who follow Associate Press style say that all special characters will be ignored or replaced to keep things simple for readers: Library (not L!brary or L!BRARY), Basecamp, E-Trade it is.
When referring to your own trademarked products, use the ® symbol for a registered trademark, the ™ symbol for an unregistered trademark, and the SM symbol for a service mark. Use them prominently whenever you mention the products; the use of the symbols reinforces your claims as rights holder.
But if you’re not the mark holder, you’re under no legal obligation to use those symbols. Just spell and capitalize the names of products and print them as nearly like the original marks as you reasonably can. Since owners have enlisted novel capitalization and punctuation to distinguish their products, however, you’re going to be faced with some bizarre-looking constructions.
What if you want to begin a sentence with eBay or end it with Yahoo!? (Note the need for a question mark after the exclamation point.) The first choice is to try to avoid the issue by reworking the sentence. If that fails, retain the name’s idiosyncrasies. And if you can’t stand the way the resulting sentence looks, go back to square one—now you have even more incentive to figure out a way to reword it:
Instead of: |
eBay is a popular online auction service. |
Try: |
One popular online auction service is eBay. |
|
|
Instead of: |
Do you use the search engine Yahoo!? |
Try: |
Is Yahoo! one of the search engines you use? |
Yahoo! itself uses the tagline “Do you Yahoo!?” It’s an infinitely concentric set of silliness we get ourselves into with such trademarked end-punctuation games. It’s enough to bring on an attack of e-ennui.
This is another area in which the old rules are being bent. The trend toward downstyle means lowercasing personal titles, even when they precede a person’s name:
chief information officer Wang Lee (abbreviation: CIO)
content provider Rolf Stuart
sysadmin Adrian Lowry (short for system administrator)
High-tech communications are spawning prefixed terms as fast as they’re spawning acronyms. The evolutionary trend in English is to go from hyphenating prefixes to writing them closed up, or solid. The question is, how quickly does the process occur? And how can you know when a term should be considered a permanently solid? Well, to some degree we’re all making these terms up as we go—and each decision is a vote leading toward consensus.
The speed of communications media is contributing to linguistic change—some writers figure that since the hyphen will disappear eventually, they might as well dispense with it at the outset. Thus, you see ebusiness, email, etrade, and even eeconomics—as one ad used to say, eenough! In the case of single-letter prefixes, we recommend retaining the hyphen rather than rushing the process. For one thing, a single-letter prefix tends to look strange without a hyphen—sort of like pig latin. It upsets spell checkers. And it may make readers stumble for a moment over pronunciation. Remember that hyphens are indeed meant as an aid to comprehension—not as decoration—and use them if in your best judgment your readers would look at a term like digiilliteracy and say “Huh?”
cyber- short for cybernetic. Generally closed up: cybercafe, cybercash™, cyberpunk (a subgenre of science fiction; the term was coined to describe William Gibson’s seminal Neuromancer, published in 1984), cybersex, cyberspace (from Neuromancer, describing the “consensual hallucination” that is approximated by the World Wide Web), cybersquatting (registering domain names early in hopes of selling them to companies later on). However, if a coinage seems likely to be a one-time use, you may prefer not to close it up: “Welcome to Cyber Purgatory.”
digi- short for digital. Like e- and cyber-, this prefix is used loosely, often to give a “hip” look to certain words. Digibabble, digirati, and digitocracy are soundalike coinages whose meanings are easy to infer.
e- short for electronic. Implies “done over the Internet.” Keep the hyphen in generic terms: e-banking, e-business, e-commerce, e-mail, e-text. Also frequently used in product names: eBay, ePaper.
hyper- hyperlink, hypertext. Refers to the system that enables readers to jump from one document to another on the Internet. The dictionary definition of hyper is “excessive,” and the use of links may verge on the excessive.
i- short for Internet. Same implication as e-. Slightly less common than e-, but used the same way. It may be used as the prefix for a Web site name (iParenting, iVillage).
meta- short for a more highly organized, comprehensive, or specialized version of a discipline of body of information: meta-analysis, metadata, metatag.
multi- short for multiple: multitasking, multithreaded.
techno- short for technical: technobabble, technophile, technophobe.
tele- short for distance. Telephone and television remind us of how quickly we assimilate new words formed with prefixes. Younger, but already almost as familiar, are such terms as telecommute and teleconference.
web- | Web- short for the World Wide Web. You have to be careful with this one, since sometimes it’s a noun used as an adjective: Web page, Web site, Web-related. When web is used as a prefix, it isn’t capitalized: webcam, webmaster, webzine.
Novel terms formed with suffixes aren’t nearly so prevalent as those formed with prefixes. Perhaps, once we’ve tacked an e- on the front of every word in the language, we’ll start relying more on suffixes.
-cast refers to a means of disseminating information: broadcast, narrowcast, netcast, webcast.
-tech from technical: high-tech (also seen as hi-tech), low-tech.
-ware from software and hardware, we go to freeware, groupware, shareware, and wetware (the brain). The plural warez (pronounced “wares”) is used specifically to refer to computer software and hardware. Ware will we go next?
Put any two words together and use them to describe a third, and you have a compound modifier. Put them together and use them to represent “a person, place, or thing,” and you have a compound noun. The question is, how do you put them together? Do you join them with a hyphen? Do you keep them pristinely apart when they appear at the end of a sentence, but insert a hyphen when they precede the word they modify? Do you throw caution to the wind and weld them together immediately?
The speed of electronic communications is accelerating certain trends in grammar. One of these trends is the tendency of terms to evolve from two words, to a hyphenated term, to one word. Some terms start and stay hyphenated. Some skip step one and maybe step two and go immediately to either a hyphenated form or a single word formed from two words.
Voicemail is good example. Some people are still writing it as two words; others have decided that it’s one word. A few used a hyphen, but not many, and not for very long. Below are some nouns we’ve seen used in various ways—we’ll go out on a limb and say we now prefer the solid form for voicemail:
click through |
click-through |
clickthrough |
home page |
home-page |
homepage |
news group |
|
newsgroup |
user group |
|
usergroup |
voice mail |
voice-mail |
voicemail |
Another trend is to discard certain so-called rules that are difficult to apply. One of these is the rule for hyphenating unit modifiers depending on their position in a sentence. Traditionally, such modifiers are hyphenated only if they precede the word they modify—unless the hyphenated form is used so frequently that it is considered a permanent compound. Here’s an example:
I like to invest in high-tech stocks.
Some of these companies are so high tech that I don’t understand what they do.
Today, however, many writers are impatient with this rule; they believe that if a compound term is likely to become permanent, it should always be hyphenated. When speed is of the essence, they reason, who has time to fiddle with guessing where finicky hyphens are on the chart? See eeicom.com/press/compounds.html for a list of terms we consider to be permanent compounds, and an article on how to recognize the various categories of compounds.
When writers coin a new word, one way to decide how to treat it is to see what existing word(s) it resembles. E-tailing was coined on the base word retailing, for example. Yet another characteristic of our language is our ability to form verbs from nouns and vice versa. And—guess what?—such mutations are happening faster than ever. Is e-mail a noun or a verb? In all but the most formal writing, it’s both. I’ll e-mail my reply. I just received your e-mail.
A cookie is an identifier that Web marketers can use to identify computers that visit their sites. Overheard in a conversation, the phrase “We’ll cookie you” passed without the listener exhibiting visible tremors of discomfort. But the speaker probably would not have written it the same way—or would he?
So if you encounter a word being used as a part of speech that isn’t assigned to it in the dictionary, it may not be wrong; it may simply be new. Comfort levels differ; when this sort of sporting spoken language is asked to sit still in print, it loses some of its verve. A little of it goes a long way in all but the most genuinely, strenuously geeky publications (for example, shift magazine).
The words below have essentially the same meanings in their noun and verb forms. Some are relatively new; some have been around for quite a while. The list does not include words such as port that have different meanings as nouns and verbs:
access |
index |
spam |
|
address |
hit |
spec |
|
cache |
host |
modem |
undo |
chat |
fax |
post |
upload |
chunk |
firewall |
program |
visit |
download |
FTP |
search |
|
There’s no difference between “Internet style” and print style when it comes to numbers, except for the fact that research shows numerals are easier to read onscreen. If you’re writing on technical or scientific topics, you’re more likely to use figures for numbers above nine and for all units of measure. In general, whatever style you normally follow for print publications will work. The subject of information technology itself can entail discussion of very large numbers, which is where certain prefixes come in:
kilo (often k)—1 thousand
mega—1 million
giga—1 billion
tera—1 trillion
How do you set a uniform resource locator (URL or Web address) in type? In general, URLs are not case-sensitive, so take the easy way and type them in lowercase letters.
For brevity, we now recommend omitting http:// and www. It’s preferable to set URLs on one line of type, without breaking them, but that’s often impossible. When you must break a URL, try to do so after a slash but before a period, to avoid the appearance of terminal punctuation. And don’t insert a hyphen when breaking a URL; since internal punctuation is part of the address, adding a hyphen where it doesn’t belong can misdirect readers.
When a sentence ends with a URL, it’s pretty safe to use terminal punctuation. Even if readers misunderstand and assume that the period is part of the URL, almost all browsers will ignore the end punctuation and take them to the right place.
How about setting off URLs typographically? It’s a question of style, not rock-ribbed right or wrong. Some publications set them in italics or bold italics. This has the advantage of making it easy to see where the URL begins and ends, although in practice that’s usually pretty obvious. We recommend following older conventions: If you don’t use a special type for a postal address or telephone number, why do it for a URL?
Microsoft Word automatically underlines anything it recognizes as a URL or an e-mail address, showing that the program has created a link to that address. In a Word file, you can double-click on such links and go from Word to the address in question. This fact has led many people to typeset URLs with an underscore. But that’s an option, not a necessity.
The Web takes away geographical boundaries; unless you’re writing for a subscription or members-only site, your work is available for viewing around the globe. Can you afford to be blind to this fact? Increasingly, the answer is no. The notion of having readers in Iceland, Serbia, Indonesia, and Ghana can be daunting—and should be inspiring, too.
Technical writers, in particular, are compelled to be aware of such issues as use of idioms that cannot be translated literally, cultural references that make no sense out of context, and even the use of certain colors in illustrations. Some companies have developed rigid vocabularies, with as many don’ts as dos (please note that it’s not do’s), to facilitate computer-assisted translation of technical documents. People who complain that such vocabularies are limiting miss the point. The vocabularies are not intended as tools of literature; they are designed to facilitate basic communication that will enable customers to use a product.
Even if you aren’t constrained by the knowledge that your work will be translated into 25 languages, you can apply some commonsense global sensitivity to your writing for the Web. Here are a few points to bear in mind.
If your Web content contains numerous abbreviations, acronyms, or initialisms, you may want to take a second look. Because readers see only a screenful of information at a time and may or may not read your entire document, the print technique of defining such terms on first mention won’t always work. Consider spelling out terms you might ordinarily abbreviate, if you think readers won’t know them. If it’s essential to use abbreviations, create links to their explanations.
If you’re referring to US dollars, say so. (“The book costs US $30.75.”) Here’s a list of countries that call their currency the dollar: Australia, the Bahamas, Barbados, Belize, Brunei, Canada, the Cayman Islands, Dominica, Fiji, Grenada, Guyana, Hong Kong, Jamaica, Kiribati, Liberia, Namibia, Nauru, New Zealand, St. Kitts-Nevis, St. Lucia, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Singapore, the Solomon Islands, Taiwan, Trinidad and Tobago, Tuvalu, the United States, and Zimbabwe. There’s plenty of overlap in other currencies, too (e.g., dinar, franc, peso). Use words rather than symbols, as well as the name of the country, if there is any likelihood of confusion. Using words also eliminates having to search for special symbols on your computer. If you’re writing about a particular time, you might also want to add the year (1998 US dollars). Because currencies fluctuate constantly, it’s not advisable to give equivalents in other currencies unless you’re writing about the past.
Particularly if you know you’re communicating with an international (or even a nationwide) audience, it’s a good idea to specify a time zone if accuracy is crucial. Here again, spell it out. “The meeting will begin at 2:30 p.m., Eastern Standard Time.” Technical or military readers, as well as many international audiences, are comfortable with the 24-hour clock: “The meeting will begin at 14:30, Eastern Standard Time.” If you decide to go with this system, mention it, to avoid confusing some readers.
Abbreviations can lead to confusion. To you 2/6/01 may be February 6, but in European countries the date normally precedes the month, so readers may perceive it as June 2. For maximum clarity, write “February 6, 2001.” If your writing is so full of dates that you think abbreviations are essential, give readers a brief explanation: “In this document, the day appears first, then the month, then the year. For example, 2/6/01 is June 2, 2001.”
Of course, the above discussion isn’t global either—it assumes a Christian (and, specifically, western, as opposed to Eastern Orthodox) calendar. January 1, 2000, didn’t signal a new millennium (or the close of an old one, to be painfully precise) in India, where the year was 1921; in Israel, where it was 5749; or in Muslim countries, where it was 1420. However, unless you expect a sizable portion of your readership to be in one of those areas, it’s safe to use the western calendar; most readers will understand it.
There are two issues to consider: punctuation and numbers above one million. Where as the United States uses commas to punctuate figures larger than four or five digits, Germany and France, for example, use periods, and Sweden uses spaces. The period/comma dichotomy is more likely to lead to misunder-standings, since a period could be mistaken for a decimal point. If your writing contains just a few large numbers, spell them out to avoid confusion. Otherwise, give an explanation: “In this document, 1,000 equals one thousand; 1.00 equals one.”
For numbers above one million, the arithmetic values actually diverge. For example, 1,000,000,000,000 is a trillion in the United States but a billion in Great Britain. Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, 11th edition, gives a cogent explanation in its table of numbers. For scientific or technical writing, it’s a good idea to use figures for such large numbers. If you spell them out, specify “US system,” for example, after the words. Remember that numerals are easier to read onscreen than words for quantities.
American English punctuation differs from British punctuation. There’s some disagreement as to whether you should adopt the latter for Web publications, assuming you don’t use it for your print materials. If you can reasonably expect or are actively seeking an international audience, and particularly if your subject matter is technical, it’s worth considering.
American: Double quotation marks for a primary quotation; single quotation marks for a quotation within a quotation. Terminal punctuation marks within quotation marks:
After shouting, ‘This so-called ‘disaster’ is all just a misunderstanding,” Roberts turned on his heel and stormed out, muttering, “I give up.”
British: Single quotation marks for a primary quotation; double quotation marks for a quotation within a quotation. Terminal punctuation marks inside or outside quotation marks, depending on sense:
After exclaiming, “This so-called “disaster” is all just a misunderstanding!’, Roberts turned on his heel and stormed out.
Until the United States gets in step with the world, writing that includes the “English” system of measurement (which the English no longer use) will need to be translated into the metric system (also called the Système International, or SI). What’s tricky is that one or the other set of measurements will be “off.” There is no exact equivalency between units in the two systems, such as inches and centimeters, feet and meters. If it’s crucial that your readers get the amounts right, you will need to measure in both systems rather than using a conversion formula. If a formula will do, there’s some inexpensive shareware that you can install on your computer to take care of the math. Don’t think it matters? Quick: If you’re driving 60 kph, are you speeding or creeping? If it’s 20°C, are you hot or cold?
We, the people of the United States, have a tendency to speak and write as if we were everyone. The words “America” and “Americans” grate on readers in Canada, Mexico, Central America, and South America when they’re applied only to the United States and its citizens. And changing the phrase “this country” to “the United States” will make your writing clearer.
More and more information is available in electronic format. Many sources are offered in both print and electronic form; some exist only as CD-ROMs or Web pages. The principle for citing electronic references is the same as that for citing print: Provide complete information that will enable the reader to locate the source.
The amount of information you need to give in text references will depend on whether you provide a formal bibliography. If you do, your in-text citation should resemble that for a print reference: Give the author (or title, if no author is available) and year of publication. For example, (Bunn, 2000) or (“A Beginner’s Guide to HTML,” 1996). Follow these guidelines for bibliographic entries:
Web sites. Attribute material to the author or authors (if you can identify them) and then give the title, URL, and the date you accessed the Web site. The latter information is important because Web sites change frequently.
Bunn, Austin. “Prisoner of Love.” http://salon.com/ent/feature/2000/01/27/letourneau/index.html. (Jan. 27, 2000). [In this example, the URL includes the date the article was published online.]
“The Living Pond.” www.sover.net/~bland/pond.htm. (Jan. 27, 2000). [This example has no author listed.]
Bray, Hiawatha. “DoubleClick’s Double Cross.” www.digitalmass.com/news/daily/0127/upgrade.html. (Jan. 27, 2000). [The URL includes the month and date, but not the year, of publication.]
E-mail. Cite e-mail messages as personal correspondence. Do not include the e-mail address of your correspondent. Give the person’s name (rather than the e-mail alias) if you know it. Where you would list the title of a publication, list the subject line of the e-mail message. Give the date the message was sent.
Smith, John. “Woodchuck population in Rhode Island.” June 30, 2000. Personal e-mail.
Jsmith. “Woodchuck population in Rhode Island.” June 30, 2000. Personal e-mail. [In this case, you know the correspondent’s alias but not the real name.]
Electronic lists and newsgroups. Because these lists are available to the public, messages received through them are not considered personal correspondence. They are, however, subject to copyright protection. In addition to the information you would cite for an e-mail message, include the name of the list or newsgroup, and both the date the message was posted and the date you accessed it.
Baughman, David. “Re: [Q] A-Fib and cardioversion?” Jan. 21, 2000. AT&T WorldNet Services, sci.med.cardiology. (Jan. 27, 2000).
CD-ROM. List the author’s name if it is available, the title of the section or article, the title of the CD-ROM, and any other publication information that is available. Since CD-ROMs are less mutable than Web sites, do not list the date you accessed the material.
“A Beginner’s Guide to HTML.” Microsoft Works & Bookshelf 1996–97. Microsoft Corp., 1996. [This example has no author listed.]
You can deal with electronic references in electronic publications by providing a link to any references you cite. Such links eliminate the need to provide URLs, since readers can access the reference directly. “Jack Powers suggests that your Web site must attract search engines in order to attract readers” is the Web substitute for “Jack Powers, at electric-pages.com/articles/wftw2.htm (Feb. 2, 2000), suggests....” Bear in mind, however, that Web documents are transient. The link may not indefinitely take readers to the article you have in mind. Providing the URL is a more durable form of citation—though not eternal.
Material published on the Internet is intellectual property and, as such, is protected by copyright. The fact that it’s easy to copy the information does not alter the principles of ownership, any more than does the fact that photocopiers make it easy to copy printed materials. Even material posted on electronic mail groups is subject to copyright protection, although, since it may have no commercial value, the author of the material would have difficulty recovering financial damages for copyright violation.
When you publish a document on the Internet, it’s a good idea to include a copyright notice, just as you would for a print publication. Doing so will make it easier to recover damages for copyright infringement. However, material that appears without such a notice is not in the public domain unless the owner specifically states that it is.
Remember, from a copyright point of view, publishing on the Internet is no different from publishing in print. The same rules of fair use apply. See the appendix of resources for continuing education for articles on fair use, online plagiarism, digital copyright legislation, and other related resources.