My Five-Inch Style Manual
Last year, as part of a project for which I was paid in actual money, I wrote a "Submission Guidelines Manual" for a website*. One section of the manual discussed style issues. Officially, we followed The Economist Style Manual, much of which is online.
I distilled the style manual into a very short list of guidelines that I try to follow in my own writing:
- Avoid tired, overused metaphors
- Favour# short words over long words
- Avoid unnecessary words
- Use active voice, not passive voice
- Avoid jargon; do not use foreign words or phrases unless there is no English alternative
- Use everyday language; don't be stuffy; avoid legalisms, beaurocratese, euphemisms and circumlocutions
- Avoid using slang words and expressions
- Be discriminating with Americanisms#; don't verb nouns
- Use good syntax
- Do not be sloppy in sentence construction
- Do not split infinitives
- Avoid contractions (can't, don't, won't…)
- Make sure that plural nouns have plural verbs
- Use the subjunctive properly
- Respect the gerund
- Be lucid
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*If you're really interested, e-mail me and I can share it with you. I thought at the time, and still do think, that's it's nicely written and succint. I would link it here except that we expect the URL to change someday soon.
#Remember, The Economist is a British publication.