Tuesday, January 21, 2003
E-What? A Guide to the Quirks of New Media Style and Usage
Book Review
E-What? A Guide to the Quirks of New Media Style and Usage
The Editors of EEI Press, EII Press, 2000 - soft cover, 116pp, US$29.95
Did I just login on my computer, log into it or did I log-in or log on? Will I be sending this review by e-mail, E-Mail, email, or will I be emailing it? Does it go over the internet, an internet or the Internet?
Many of these questions are asked, some more than once, by subscribers to the SWET-L mailing list. The answers given are usually authoritative, but at a time when new technology is expanding the range of English, it’s good to have a handy desk reference that will answer these and other questions. E-What? attempts to provide exactly that and for the most part succeeds in the attempt.
Note that this is book is not a nerd’s dictionary. It won’t enable you to hold your own in techno-geek conversations when the small talk turns to database search algorithms or the relative merits of RAID 1 versus RAID 0 disk arrays. What it will do is educate you with regard to those parts of technology which have now become parts of everyday language, and, for those of you with Japanese clients, will provide you with an authority to back up your contention that “Web site” is correct usage, and “home page” or (God save us all) “HP” is not the way to describe a company’s presence on the World Wide Web.
E-What? is divided into three major sections: a style guide, an annotated glossary and instructions and reference about creating your own in-house style guide.
Particularly useful is the style guide, which gives some advice and history on Web and other electronic writing. For example, “a widely accepted statistic is that people read 25 percent slower on a computer screen than on paper. The corollary is that a document written for the Web should be 25 percent shorter than one written for print”. Whether or not you accept the exact statistic given here, there is more than a grain of truth in this statistic, and anyone writing for the Web should take this thought into account.
There is a glossary, which takes up fewer than half of the pages. Useful reference, but in some cases, rather basic. At times I felt that the definitions could have had a little more flesh on the bones (e.g. the whole of one entry reads: “RAM - random access memory”. So what’s random about it, who accesses it, etc.?) but I discovered nothing I would consider an error, and it is nice to know for sure that it is “RAM” and not “R.A.M.”, for example.
The authors of this book obviously recognize that language changes, and that technology is a powerful tool for linguistic change, but (sensibly, in my opinion) take the view that “we don’t have to start writing or, as readers, tolerating gibberish just because the boundaries of language are elastic”. There is an excellently explained rationale behind most of the prescribed usage in this glossary, and even where I disagree with the ultimate conclusions (not often), I can appreciate that there was a reason for the choice, and I have even ended up changing my preferred usage in a couple of instances (for example, when citing Web sites) as a result of the reasons given.
As always, I find it better to be provided with general rules from which specific examples can be derived, allowing for “future-proofing” of the material. What’s the process by which words move to an inclusive form (“check box” to “checkbox” via “check-box”) and when should we go with the flow (even if, as E-What? puts it, “it feels more like whitewater kayaking than rafting down the Mississippi”) and when should we retain our conservatism? E-What? answers these questions and many others related to capitalization, abbreviations, technical jargon, etc. in a practical and commonsense way.
As a non-USAian (I am using this term based on the advice in E-What?: “We, the people of the United States, have a tendency to speak and write as if we were everyone. The words “America” and “Americans” grate on readers in Canada, Mexico, Central America, and South America when they’re applied only to the United States and its citizens. Changing the phrase “this country” to “the United States” makes your writing clearer”), one extremely welcome point (though I don’t feel I need it) is the reminder that the “rest of the world” (i.e., virtually all countries other than the USA) do not understand the non-metric system, that “dollars” are used in more countries of the world than merely the USA, and that metaphors like “about the size of a city block ” are meaningless in many countries. I am delighted to see that this publication is helping USA readers to realize the deeper implications of the first two Ws of “WWW”.
The last part of the book talks about the development of one’s own style guide within an organization. This was especially apposite, as I recently had to develop such a style guide for one of my clients. Looking at the advice given in E-What? I have to say that I did not do as good a job as I might have done. In fact, I wasn’t pleased with it at the time, but now I know exactly why I wasn’t pleased and I am now seriously thinking of revising the guide and the production process completely, based on the recommendations here.
So, did I learn anything from E-What? As far as my personal knowledge of technical terms is concerned, the answer is no (I can outgeekspeak many geeks if I have to), but in a famous geeky abbreviation, YMMV. For those readers who do not naturally think in terms of an alphabet soup of meaningless initials and acronyms, the rationale and the glossary are valuable reference tools. Did I learn anything about the evolution of modern language and technical writing related to my job? Most certainly, and this and the advice on the evolution and maintenance of a style guide are worth the price of admission as far as most readers are concerned. Also, the mere fact that I have all of this in writing and I can quote it to the more obstinate of my clients who want me to use their own variants of the standard in my writing, justifies the inclusion of this book on my shelves.
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