Style guidelines are sneaky and difficult

Internet

K-On Style!

When you work for a publication you're presented with a series of style guidelines you have to follow in your work, if I'm to believe what people in the bidness have told me. Senior members of Rubenerd Blog management (myself and my teddy bear) have been complaining about a series of style issues for our blog here, mostly to do with names.

  1. If the name eBay or an Apple iThing is the first word in a sentence, do you capitalise it?
  2. For anime like K-On! and sites like Yahoo!, do you keep the exclamation marks even if you’re in the middle of a sentence?
  3. For Japanese names like Her Senjougharaness, do you use ou or risk older browsers only rendering ō instead? Is that a concern?
  4. When talking about projected Microsoft products, because it’s regarding an American company do we spell it vaporware instead of vapourware?
  5. Is GCS an acceptable acronym for grilled cheese sandwiches given it also stands for the GNU Coding Standards?
  6. Is it okay to refer to them as grilled cheese sandwiches in the first place so we reach a wider audience than if we called them jaffels which, while being technically a better name, only Aussies would know what we’re talking about?
  7. Is it a sign of madness that a lone blogger considers a teddy bear to be a member of his blog’s senior management?
  8. Did this list lose relevance after point 3?
  9. Is the Bird the Word?

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Me!

Ruben Schade is a technical writer and infrastructure architect in Sydney, Australia who refers to himself in the third person. Hi!

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