Summary

Guideline 14 of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 1.0) requires that documents are clear and simple. Having a good writing style will ensure your content will be clearly understood, and ensure you keep your readers' attention.

Author: Gez Lemon

Contents

Good Grammar

I've been investigating writing styles. Being punctilious about writing style is not about pedantry; it is about being able to communicate effectively with your intended audience. The use of correct grammar without spelling mistakes makes it easier for your readers to digest and correct punctuation helps steer the reader through the text, clarifying how you intend the text to be interpreted. And of course, it ensures your content is accessible to the widest possible audience. We've probably all seen examples of where a misplaced comma or apostrophe completely changes the meaning of the text; a pretty tall lady is quite different in meaning to a pretty, tall lady.

Style Guides

By far the best resource I've found online is the Guardian's Style Guide (no longer available online). It's made me realise just how bad my grammar is, but it's great to have an online reference to refer to when you're unsure of a particular issue. Under abbreviations, pretty much right at the start of the style guide, I discovered that one of my most serious crimes is over-using contractions.

The rash of contractions such as aren't, can't, couldn't, hasn't, don't, I'm, it's, there's and what's has reached epidemic proportions (even the horrific "there've" has appeared in the paper). While they might make a piece more colloquial or easier to read, they can be an irritant and a distraction, and make a serious article sound frivolous.

I'll make a better effort to restrict the number of contractions I use in the future. I will make a better effort to restrict the number of contractions I use in the future.

Zero Tolerance

If you're after something available offline, Lynne Truss's comical Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation is an excellent book. It may not affect your grammar (I've read it, and I'm sure Lynne would be mortified with my use of the English language), but it's entertaining non-the-less. The title of the book is based on a joke about bad punctuation.

A panda strolls into a cafe and orders a sandwich. When the food arrives, the panda eats the sandwich, pulls out a gun and fires a shot into the ceiling, then walks out. Bemused by the behaviour of the panda, the waiter looks on the Internet where he finds the answer in a badly punctuated wildlife website:

Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves.

Category: Accessibility.

Comments

  1. [writing-style.php#comment1]

    Good post Gez.

    After having read that book I have definitely started to notice more errors in writing, especially my own. There is still an error on my site that offends me by being there, and I really must get round to fixing it; still, I suppose that leaving it there means that I am not quite at the level of insanity of Lynne (marker pen at the ready!) which I would definitely class as a good thing - I hope that you haven't reached that level yet Gez.

    Posted by Adam on

  2. [writing-style.php#comment3]

    There is, without doubt, a lot of value to grammar checking as well as spell checking articles. (Know of any good web editor that does both, while you type? MS Word has a good one, and maybe Word 2003 can save its xml to XHTML perhaps. But I would hate to use a word processor as a text editor for web development!! I have come across a few that have spell checking as you type, but not grammar checking as you type.)

    The bigger issue to me is the correct style of writing -- what type of grammar checking do you go for? Very formal, or informal writing style?

    The thing about contractions, for example, is that if you are writing a personal site or blog, then being natural, in my opinion, is perhaps best for it reaches out to an audience with a more personal approach. It is natural to use contractions, for example. Sometimes, full sentences don't work well when writing in a natural, conversational style.

    For journalistic articles (e.g. the Guardian) and other formal writing, then those finer details are extremely important.

    But this isn't a suggestion to ignore grammar or consistently avoid full sentences *wink*

    Another issue I find depends on the geographical location of your audience.

    American audiences are used to slightly different grammatical styles. E.g. in uk I always learned that you don't have a comma before an and, when listing things in a sentence, whereas Americans seem to (though I now here people in UK 'correcting' me on this, so maybe I am wrong here).

    There are also smaller things like if you are quoting someone or thing at the end of the sentence, you put the fullstop inside the quote, whereas British English does it outside (at least from my limited knowledge and looking at newspapers!)

    In addition, we have the spelling differences which do not need describing.

    I find (to some amazement, but also less surprising, perhaps) that a number of Americans don't realize the spelling is international/British English when you use 'ise' or u in words like colour. They think it is a spelling mistake!

    Even some established American journalists don't get this. There was something the Observer revealed about some controversy to do with the Iraq crisis (that maybe the Brits or Americans had misled the public about something -- can't remember the details), and the American press said the leaked article that the Observer was citing could not be real because of the spelling mistakes. Turns out the Observer anglicized the spelling for the British audience (apparently a standard thing to do!).

    What does a writer in England who might have an audience that includes Americans do? The most international of sites I can think of is the U.N. Opinions about the site aside, the English they use seems to be British English (hence reference to international English earlier). Your site, I imagine probably has a lot of visitors from the U.S.? I guess this choice depends on the nature of a web site and the intended audience base. It is perhaps worth noting in an accessibility or about type page? It also affects what grammar checking you do or use!

    [Sorry if I caused offense to Americans -- none intended]

    Anup

    P.S. - I probably have a ton of gammatical errors in this post, but hopefully it makes reasonable sense!

    Posted by Anup on

  3. [writing-style.php#comment4]

    The bigger issue to me is the correct style of writing -- what type of grammar checking do you go for? Very formal, or informal writing style?

    I suppose the important thing is to select a style you feel comfortable with and is suitable for your intended audience, and stick with it. I'll be sticking to contractions, as that kind of informality is fine for a blog and does make it a bit easier to read. I realised I was going over the top with them when I found myself tempted to write words such as, you'll've.

    in UK I always learned that you don't have a comma before an and, when listing things in a sentence, whereas Americans seem to (though I now here people in UK 'correcting' me on this, so maybe I am wrong here).

    It is acceptable to put a comma before an 'and' (known as the Oxford Comma) in UK English. I suppose it depends on your English teacher as to whether it was acceptable at your school. Our English teacher taught the Oxford Comma method, so I tend to go with that style.

    There are also smaller things like if you are quoting someone or thing at the end of the sentence, you put the fullstop inside the quote, whereas British English does it outside

    Unless the quote itself is a full sentence, in which case the final punctuation mark is placed within quotes. Personally, I don't have a problem with either convention. Again, it's a case of selecting a style that works for you (whether that's geographical or by preference), and being consistent.

    What does a writer in England who might have an audience that includes Americans do? The most international of sites I can think of is the U.N. Opinions about the site aside, the English they use seems to be British English (hence reference to international English earlier). Your site, I imagine probably has a lot of visitors from the U.S.? I guess this choice depends on the nature of a web site and the intended audience base. It is perhaps worth noting in an accessibility or about type page? It also affects what grammar checking you do or use!

    I suppose it is worth mentioning in the accessibility statement, but the natural language should be stated in markup. I've never considered the difference between US and UK English to be a significant barrier. This site does have a lot of US visitors, but I've never been contacted about confusion over language; other than for genuine grammatical mistakes I've made.

    Posted by Gez on

  4. [writing-style.php#comment5]

    What a great link. Thanks for this Gez.
    It's one of those pages that once you read it, you wonder how you ever did without it. Definite bookmark.

    Posted by Ebs on

  5. [writing-style.php#comment6]

    Regarding an article I found focusing on automated analysis of written English..

    Interestingly enough, I ventured upon a Macintosh related website recently which underwent the age-old (and perhaps stupid) task of 'testing' the intelligence of Mac vs PC vs UNIX users.

    Their approach to the 'test' was very objective and there are no (serious) claims of higher-intelligence among diverse platform users. The article appears to be more focused on methods/approaches of testing and their subsequent approach was to use automated applications to measure and compare the literacy/writing style of [mac/pc/UNIX] forums. The eventual test was just to assess the literacy of the aforementioned forum communities. I'm truly sorry for spoiling the result but happily OSX user forums prevailed(although i'll gladly admit factors of the test may result in inaccuracy).

    Yes! - I do realise the irony of myself as a close-to-illiterate Mac user posting this very reply.

    One of the programs used during the study is called "diction" and is summarized on their homepage as follows:

    "This program includes both 'diction' and 'style'. 'Diction' identifies wordy and commonly misused phrases; 'tyle' analyzes surface characteristics of a document, including sentance length and other readability measures.
    While these programs cannot help you structure a document well, they can help to avoid poor wording and compare the readability of your document with others. Both commands support English and German documents."

    Even more ironic than my badly-structured post is the fact that their description of their own language-analysis software contains typos, misspelled words and is generally poorly written. Regardless of this, the software itself is reputably accurate, I'll probably compile a copy when I get home from work (and post the results of http://juicystudio.com).

    Link to the article itself(Good read!):
    http://www.macnewsworld.com/story/35130.html

    Diction app (UNIX open source):
    http://www.gnu.org/directory/GNU/diction.html

    Incidentally ...

    The link to the diction article/macsite was found on http://www.slashdot.org/ (news for nerds), It has A LOT of good reading and some very interesting discussions subsequent to posted "frontpage" articles. However, I should point out that the user-base is predominantly UNIX-based and that particular community of Slashdot are extremely biased towards anything GNU (and in particular anything anti-Microsoft). Although, after saying that I should also point out that I've recently noticed improvements in objectivity within most of their comments, and only large-scale zealous behaviour is found in articles pertaining to [GNU/Linux/UNIX/Microsoft/Lindows/OSS/GPL]-- Arguments).

    -dean b.

    Posted by dean b on

  6. [writing-style.php#comment7]

    An excellent article. I hadn't thought much about contractions until I read this, and realise I use many of them. I also wonder alot whether someone will think 'realise' is misspelt. I feel better knowing the I'm not alone with this quandary.

    Posted by Toni on

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