The Yahoo! Style Guide: The Ultimate Sourcebook for Writing, Editing, and Creating Content for the Digital World

Up until now, Web writers have mostly relied on guidance from traditional, i.e., print-oriented, guides such as The Chicago Manual of Style, The Elements of Style, and The Associated Press Stylebook.  (The AP Stylebook does, however, address many Web terms.)

An excellent guide that does offer a thorough overview of issues in writing for the Web is Letting Go of the Words: Writing Web Content That Works by Janice (Ginny) Redish (2007).

Yahoo! is many things.  It’s a major Internet services company that’s well known for its Web portal, search engine, advertising, online mapping, video sharing, and social media services.  But, as far as I know, Yahoo! has never been known for a high standard of writing on its various sites.  We should wait and see what this new style guide covers.

According to pre-publication announcements, Yahoo!’s new style guide will “cover the basics of grammar and punctuation as well as Web-specific ways to perfect a site, such as: identifying the audience and making the site accessible to everyone; constructing clear and compelling copy; developing a site’s unique voice; streamlining text for mobile devices; optimizing Web pages to increase the chances of appearing in search results; and streamlining text so that people can read your pages at Internet speed.”

The Yahoo! style guide has earned praise from Jakob Nielsen, Ph.D., a leading Web usability consultant who calls it an “Excellent and eminently useful book with many compelling examples of rewrites. While rewriting content for usability will hugely increase a website’s business value, the word list alone can save you the cost of the book by eliminating wasted time arguing over proper usage.”

I expect to buy a copy of the guide when it comes out and I’ll be joining my fellow blogger Crawford Kilian over at Writing for the Web in hoping that “it has something sensible to say about any company that insists on including an exclamation mark in its name.”  (We Crawfords have to stick together.)

As a business grows, it produces more correspondence, email, proposals, marketing material, press releases, and articles in outside publications.  Then there are white papers, HR booklets, and documents that must comply with government standards.   Sooner or later, there’s confusion about the “right way” to write something.  There may already be general (unspoken) agreement about writing style, but a new employee or an outside writer will be at a disadvantage.

Advantages to having a company style manual:

• Provides consistency
• Establishes a certain “sound” for external publications
• Answers common questions on usage, punctuation, and abbreviations
• Sets rules for avoiding charges of sexism
• Saves time spent on revisions

A good way to start is for the company to adopt a third-party style guide, such as The Chicago Manual of Style.  There are other, industry-specific and technical, style guides.  Next, the company can use the third-party guide as backup and write a supplement that gives:

• Terminology used by the company and its industry
• The company’s preferences – including those that differ with the third-party guide
• Answers to FAQs from the staff and outside parties
• Examples of writing that complies with the company’s style