Guide to Style Guides

Some of the better quality newspapers such as The Guardian and The Times provide style guides for the benefit of their journalists. The idea being that all the articles appearing in their publications should be consistent in terms of punctuation, spelling, capitalisation and use of language. The guides are usually made available to the public in book form and/or on the internet, such as The Times style book. If you’re into this sort of thing it can make for fascinating reading.

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Usually the style guide writers also advise on topical issues, such as how to spell Colonel Gaddafi’s surname out of the 32 or more possible options (strictly speaking it’s an alliteration of his name from the Libyan original).

Apart from useful guidance on where to place hyphens and suchlike the style guides often provide a list of “banned words”. This isn't often, contrary to what you might expect, a list of swear words and terms. Instead, it is something that the guardians of good writing practice find far more heinous, namely clichés, tautolgies and sensationalisms such as

Brutal murders - all murders are brutal so that word isn’t needed
Innocent victims - victims are by their very nature innocent
Jaw-dropping

The tone of these style guides can be quite amusing. For example, Americanisms are frowned upon and and so are seemingly politically correct terms such as chairperson. The word “toilet” is on the banned list too, this obviously has lower-class connotations, despite it being the word that you will see on the door of public toilets.

So, the higher quality press has style guides that aspire to keeping their journalistic standards high. Do the gutter press have style guides encouraging sensational headlines, stereotyping and stating the obvious. Do men's magazines provide guidance to their journalists on how to objectify women, relate their tales of excessive drinking and the best way to describe bodily functions. Maybe they do, but somehow I think these are the sort of guides less likely to be made available to the public.