06 Nov 2023

My style guide

A few months ago, I republished a web copy style guide by Matt Pfeffer and enjoyed it. Then, a few days ago, I found a style guide by Chase McCoy which I also liked. So I decided to write my own.

Much like Chase’s, mine will be a work-in-progress and I will inevitably go against my rules. But it’s the thought that counts, right?

Grammar

• Titles always in sentence case unless for an aesthetic reason or for comedic effect
• Punctuation on the inside of a quote (“because the other way feels icky”).
• Oxford commas for now, forever, and always
• Em dashes shouldn’t have the space either side of them—okay?!
• En Dashes are for numerical ranges such as dates or times and that’s a rule I’ll always keep from Day 1–365
• Companies/brands are singular, not plural. “Google is a company” rather than “Google are a company”

Hyperlinking

• From now on, I will avoid using long text sentences as anchor text as it isn’t optimised or helpful for the user
  • Instead, I will use shorter phrases or just the main entity.
• I will also avoid linking to entities purely for internal linking purposes that offer little relevance to the text. For example, if I write about cats and I mention something about computers briefly, I won’t link “computers” to my tech page (but I’ve linked it just now because it’s relevant to the point).