SubscribeYahoo! to Publish an Internet Style Guide
On July 6, 2010 Yahoo!’s style guide for the Internet will appear in bookstores ($21.99) and on Amazon ($13.49 before shipping). The Yahoo! Style Guide: 
The Ultimate Sourcebook for Writing, Editing, and Creating Content for the Digital World is the result of the company’s efforts over the last 15 years to build its own internal guidelines for Web writing.
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.)
I don’t consider Yahoo to be a credible source for information about writing, especially when it can’t get its own writers and editors to follow its style guide. The announcement for the style guide promises to settle the question of “Web site, web site, or website?” yet you’ll find all three on Yahoo. See the blog post at Terribly Write for just a few examples: http://terriblywrite.wordpress.com/2010/04/09/is-it-website-web-site-or-web-site-who-knows-not-yahoo/
Every day (or everyday as the Yahoo writers would have it), Yahoo commits some of the most egregious crimes against the language. The number of misspellings, grammatical gaffes, typos, homophonic errors, and factual errors on Yahoo is astounding considering it’s supposed to have a staff of professional writers and editors. Terribly Write chronicles thousands of mistakes that would embarrass a legitimate media outlet.