Style with a different twist

Doing something fun today - writing a style guide for the magazine I work for. "What is that?" you ask. It is the document that tells you how to use punctuation, capitalisation, spelling of tricky words, how to write dates etc. And is particularly useful because if you follow it you will hopefully end up with a magazine that is internally consistent.

 Me with my Managing Editor, Gary Bauman.

It is a particularly difficult issue for us because this magazine is published in a non-English speaking country and is put together by people from different "English" backgrounds. Just my presence on the editorial team puts a spoke in the works. For example, I automatically want to correct things to match my Australian English background. However the magazine has an unofficial policy of sticking to the rules from the author's country of origin. 

My American Managing Editor has an American English style guide, but not one for Commonwealth English. So I've now got the job of trying to put together a unique style guide that expresses how we're going to get some uniformity into our magazine editing.


I'm learning some of that grammar that they were skipping in the 70s and 80s in Australian schools. Plus the different words that each country uses for different grammatical elements. 

Some I knew like full stop vs period. I didn't know that American's use of "brackets" differed to the Australian use. These: ( ) are "brackets" for Australians. Americans call them "parentheses". Americans call these "brackets": [ ]. Australians call those "square brackets".


Americans put periods after anything that has been abbreviated, but Australians don't do it for contractions. For example, "Mrs" doesn't have a full stop in Australia, but it does in American.

Then you have dates. Australians write dates Day/Month/Year, Americans write it Month/Day/Year and Japanese write it Year/Month/Day. Totally confusing if you have something like 4/5/11!


Fascinating - yes? Sigh. I might be learning some, but it is tedious. I suspect this is one part of editing that I dislike the most. Details aren't really my thing, though I can push myself to focus on them if I concentrate. And some days are better than others.