For the past couple of weeks in Serious Eats Talk, I’ve been meddling with Talk topic titles, trying to help make them more precise and reflective of what’s being asked in the thread.

In some cases, I truly think my meddling is helpful. For instance, “Need a butcher in Phoenix” is a better title than “Need a butcher.”

Well, the Serious Eats community is sharp, and they’ve noticed. I’ve been called out a couple times now on it, the latest in this thread that SE member PerkyMac started early Tuesday morning.

I’ve been following the conversation and commenting there over the last two days and have realized that maybe a large part of my headline meddling had to do with some of the recent off-topicality in Talk. We’ve gotten more than a few emails in the last couple months about threads going off-topic and becoming too filled with chit chat. And now I’m wondering if my playing with Talk titles was a way to try to correct that and steer things in a more serious direction.

Anyway, I have more to say about it in this comment on that thread. What I’m blabbing about here is my Style Bites site, which I’ve now taken out from behind its privacy wall.

SE member dbcurrie, who works at a newspaper, brought up AP style in the abovementioned thread, and it reminded me that I had been keeping Style Bites to myself. I really love talking about copy-editing and blogging and writing for the web (which is also why that Talk topic has been so fun to participate in). And now that I’m sharing the Style Bites blog, I hope to do more of it on Kublog/Style Bites.

You may wonder if some of the stuff that goes on in SE Talk drives me batty as a copy editor. And I have to admit that, yes, yes, it does. When people don’t put spaces between sentences—or between a comma and the following word—it just burns my eyeballs to look at it. When people use five exclamation points where one will do. Or five question marks. Or ALL CAPS.

We’ve always corrected excessive punctuation in titles and have lowercased ALL CAPS, but I think I’ve gone overboard with setting Talk titles in title casing and in changing them. But for the most part, I do try to leave the body of the Talk threads alone. I don’t expect that everyone has had the same copy-edit training that I have, so it’s sort of a live and let live thing. (Although if I do see obvious typos, I will fix them (“peal onions” to “pearl onions” in SE Talk is a recent example I can think of).

Anyway, for anyone not working for/with Serious Eats, Style Bites is more a behind-the-scenes look at what we do. For SE staff/contributors, it’s strongly suggested reading. And for other foodbloggers, it might be a helpful resource.

I’ll have to play around with the templates behind Style Bites to tweak some functionality, but I hope to add some more entries sooner rather than later.

capitalization
Watch
your caps, folks. I’m seeing weird-ass shit that shouldn’t be capped.
And I’m seeing things lowercased that should absolutely be capped. It’s
driving me crazy because this is elementary school English. I’m not
going to go over the basic rules of capitalization, because you learned
that in third grade. Er, maybe I will …

• Proper nouns (also called proper names): Nouns representing unique entities (such as London, Universe, or John), as distinguished from …
• Common nouns: Nouns which describe a class of entities (such as city, well, or person).

Proper nouns are capitalized. Common nouns are not.

No: The best Hot Dogs in Chicago can be found at Hot Doug’s.
Yes: The best hot dogs in Chicago can be found at Hot Doug’s.

No: Ed says he really likes the thai food at Won Dee Siam.
Yes: Ed says he really likes the Thai food at Won Dee Siam.

commas, with state and city names
Please use commas after both the city name and the state name when namechecking a city/state in body copy.

No: Washington D.C. hosts a respectable amount …
Yes: Washington, D.C., hosts a respectable amount …

No: Daniel Boulud got his start in Wichita Kansas as a line cook at Burger King.
No: Daniel Boulud got his start in Wichita, Kansas as a line cook at Burger King.

Yes: Daniel Boulud got his start in Wichita, Kansas, as a line cook at Burger King.

dates
Don’t use ordinals on dates.
No: The iPhone 3G comes out on July 11th.
Yes: The iPhone 3G comes out on July 11.

italics
PLEASE USE ITALICS for the following:

Titles of …

• newspapers
• books
• magazines
• TV shows
• movies
• music albums
• names of sea- and spacefaring vessels (You may laugh, but we have an instance here )

LAY OFF THE ITALICS for trying to emphasize things in body copy. You can do that with the bolding schtick.

quotation marks, in post titles and subheds
DO NOT USE double quotes in headlines or post titles. USE SINGLE QUOTES.


[This SB was previously covered in the 5/25/2008 and 6/1/2008 edition.]


No: “Crazy Legs” Conti Eats a Hot Dog
Yes: ‘Crazy Legs’ Conti Eats a Hot Dog

No: Jersey “Food Court” Dispatch: Mitsuwa Marketplace
Yes: Jersey ‘Food Court’ Dispatch: Mitsuwa Marketplace

No: Australian Senate: Ramsay Fills TV with “Astounding Volume of Foul Language”
Yes: Australian Senate: Ramsay Fills TV with ‘Astounding Volume of Foul Language’

quotation marks, with commas and periods
Commas and periods go inside the quotation marks. [This SB was previously covered in the 6/1/2008 and 5/25/2008 editions.]

“I eat like a pig,” Joey Chestnut said. Not “I eat like a pig”, Joey Chestnut said.

Joey Chestnut said, “I eat like a pig.” Not Joey Chestnut said, “I eat like a pig”.

serial commas
I want those apples, oranges, and pears.
I want mushrooms, onions, and sausage on my pizza.

I want to see you all using the serial comma. Your English teacher may have beaten into you that you drop the comma before the and. S/he wasn’t necessarily wrong. You can drop it or use it. I think it adds clarity to a sentence, and we should employ it.

tags
Use plurals. And make sure to capitalize proper nouns. Ex.: wedding cakes, not wedding cake; Japan, not japan.

WORDS TO WATCH

all-you-can-eat
All-you-can-eat buffet

amid vs. amidst

Use amid. (Refrain from using longer words when shorter ones will do. Plus, it’s pretentious.)

among vs. amongst
Use among. (Refrain from using longer words when shorter ones will do. Plus, it’s pretentious.)

barbecue
Not BBQ. Not bar-be-que. Not bar-b-que. It is always barbecue, unless it is in the context of a restaurant name, in which case we should honor that spelling.

British spellings
Avoid. I don’t want to see colour, flavour, favourite, defence or any other British spellings–unless you’re British and have special permission.

chocolaty
not chocolately or chocolate-y

fancy-pants
Not fancypants.

house-made
Not housemade.

“just [BLANK] enough”
Just salty enough, just sweet enough, just chewy enough, just crisp enough.

Enough! We’re overusing this phrase. Please find a way around this
locution. It’s fine every once in a while, but it begins to lose its
meaning after several iterations.

non-
Most non words are closed up: nonstop, nonrefundable. Your inclination may be to hyphenate these. Fight that inclination. Check this out: http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/non

pre-
Most words beginning with the prefix pre are closed up: prebake, prewash, precut. Amazing, huh? Not really: http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/pre

that

In many instances you can remove that from a sentence without changing the meaning Ex.: He said that he wanted to go to Di Fara. She said that it was OK to eat the potato salad.

un-
Most words beginning with the prefix un are closed up: unaffordable, uninspired, unapproved.
However: un-American, un-English, un-European. When used with a proper noun, they form hyphenated compounds. http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/un-

very
One of the first things you learn in Reporting 101 is that nine times out of ten, you can take the ax to very
without changing your sentence one bit. It’s a so-called intensifier
that gets in the way of strong, direct writing. Often used by lazy
writers. What’s the differencebetween The cake was very good and The cake was good? Wasted keystrokes.

PROTOCOL/SITE OPS

don’t space out
Watch your use of spaces within HTML coding.

No: Eater <a href=”URL”>reports that </a>David Chang scratched his balls today.
Yes: Eater <a href=”URL”>reports that</a> David Chang scratched his balls today.

In the case above, the errant space will yield a sloppy-looking link, leaving a little bit of underlining between that and David:

I often see this with <em> and <strong> coding, too.
Admittedly, it’s less critical in those instances, but you might was
well watch your HTML there, too, as laziness in one area begets
laziness in others.

DATES
Spell out names of months. If citing an exact date with year, commas come after the date and the year (unless, of course, the date comes at the end of the sentence). Do not tack on an ordinal ending to the date (e.g., “st,” “nd,” “rd,” “th”).