Yahoo! Style Guide: Writing for the World

Very little in recent news has pleased me as much as learning that Yahoo! has published a style guide for 21st-century writers. It's not just because I'm an old fuddy-duddy (though I may be) who used to earn her living in the lost arts of copyediting and proofreading (when every correction cost money in resetting type). It's not just the mechanical inadequacies of spellcheckers and stylecheckers that try to second-guess me as I type. It's the very reminder that the purpose of writing is communication, the recognition that communication connects writer to reader only when both use the same words the same way, and appreciation of the ways our living and globally dominant English language came to be so rich.

The choice of a word to use can also communicate a mindset or attitude that goes deeper than the lexicography. That's why I'm especially glad to see, within the groundbreaking "Writing for the Web" section of the new Yahoo! Guide, topics on gender neutrality, biasing expression in general, and accessibility.

Consider Your Audience When Choosing the Right Words

As in so many issues of good writing, the best way to avoid bias is to know your audience. But as the Yahoo! Style Guide's online tutorial notes, the great thing and the hard thing about writing for the Web is that you may not know who is going to read your writing. That mostly means that you can't make assumptions and use "insider" jargon that one group of readers may find funny and another group offensive. It's always better to use, as the Style Guide suggests, "the terms favored by the group" you're writing about. On the other hand, if you're referring specifically to a member of a group who has asked not to be given the "favored" label, use what that individual has asked to be called, or do without any reference to group membership. White friends argued with me, another White woman, that I needn't use "African American" in preference to "Black" because Bill Cosby had said it was unnecessary. Even if that's what Dr. Cosby meant (a quick NYTimes search turns up no reference to check), it's unfair to ask him to speak for everyone who shares this one characteristic. If I ever have occasion to write specifically about Bill Cosby and need to specify his racial identification, I'll do the work to find out what he prefers to be called. But other than that, I'll rely on some very good friends who have told me they're glad to be called African Americans (and who do not hesitate to tell me when I've said something they don't like).

If you're not a member of that group and writing exclusively for others in the group, you need to be even more wary of attempting to adopt their insider terms. "Your people" is entirely different from "our people," as H.Ross Perot (a White Texan) was taught (and may have learned) after addressing the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) before the official start of his 1992 campaign for the U.S. Presidency. While it's probably best in general, as the Style Guide recommends, to refer to people with an adjectival characteristic - people with disabilities rather than the disabled is the classic - it's also good to know when you're straying into self-defined subcultures. I would probably use the generalized people with hearing impairments or disabilities rather than deaf people as suggested in the online tutorial, but there is a time and place to speak of the Deaf with a capital D. That would be only when I was speaking of the subculture that identifies itself that way, and I would be very wary of taking that direction without careful checking with members of the community.

Site Accessibility Matters

While we're on the subject of people with disabilities, let me celebrate the Yahoo! Style Guide's two online pages on making the Web "accessible to everyone," especially the 10 specific questions to ask yourself or your designer to "Gauge your site's accessibility" to those with special needs for interacting with Web pages through vision, hearing, and/or movement.

Overcoming Gender Labeling

A final note addresses the page I probably appreciate the most, "Write gender-neutral copy." It includes a set of writing strategies for avoiding gender-specific pronouns, with an example of each, and a list of gender-specific words with their widely accepted replacements, from actor to server (instead of waiter or waitress). I understand the editors' bowing to -person constructions (chairperson, waitperson, ...), but hope that as the community of careful Web writing goes forward, we'll work on less clunky options. I can't remember the last time I heard stewardess, other than in historical context. Let's do the same for -person, which so easily shades into mocking "political correctness." The Style Guide's list of suggestions does a great job of promoting greater precision to overcome gender labeling, such as differentiating a mail carrier who delivers mail from a postal worker who may labor inside a USPS facility, and saying what kind of business a person engages in. But how about simply giving up a dated noun like spokesman and making it a verb - instead of White House spokesman/person, why not speaking for the president or, if you must, speaking officially or with the authority of?

I also missed in the list of gender-neutral terms the continuing irritant of Members of Congress (not their behavior, how they're referred to). Members of the Senate are fine, except when they call each other "gentlewo/man." But in the other house, the House, we can't seem to walk away from Congresswo/man to the simple Representative or Member. I'm incredibly glad that Rep. Nancy Pelosi can be just the Speaker of the House. I don't even mind if they sometimes call her Madame Speaker.

The Yahoo! Style Guide Makes Language Work for Web Writers

A style guide is important because it draws all of us who are writing for the Web into a community that cares how we communicate. It's all too easy to throw just anything up on this world-wide platform, with or without snarking dismissals of grade-school grammar exercises. But it's just as easy to give readers the wrong impression of what you meant to say or how you feel about it. It's too easy to offend and leave readers out of the conversation, and too easy for them to just ignore writers who do leave them out. We all have loads of options for reading on the Web. Writers who don't learn how to make the language work for them will soon be writing to empty screens. Especially with the good start of the Yahoo! Style Guide, there's no reason for that.