Yahoo! to publish a style guide for the internet

Via SFGate.com: Yahoo! Publishes A Style Guide For The Internet. Excerpt:

Yahoo! is publishing its own stylebook for the Internet. "The Yahoo! Style Guide: The Ultimate Sourcebook for Writing, Editing, And Creating Content For The Digital World" will hit stores on July 6, 2010 at $21.99 for retail. Amazon will sell it for $13.49 before shipping. 

...Chris Barr, Yahoo's senior editorial director and CNET's founding editor-in-chief, is the top editor of the book, along with other senior editors at Yahoo!. 

"Writers and programmers at Yahoo!, faced with a lack of industry guidance fifteen years ago, began cobbling together a set of guidelines for Web writing," according to the book description from St. Martin's Press, a division of MacMillon, which publishing the guidebook. 

"Yahoo! content creators have built and added to the guide ever since, making it the go-to manual inside Yahoo!"

Of course I'll acquire a copy, and I hope it has something sensible to say about any company that insists on including an exclamation mark in its name.

Comments

[KateeS]

I'm not sure I'd trust a style guide from a company that can't seem to follow one. The original writing from yahoo contains so many errors (typos, misspellings, grammatical mistakes, factual errors, and on and on) that it has no credibility with me. I've been reading Terribly Write, a blog about the writing on yahoo, and it's clear that the company doesn't care about language. It's both sad and funny. See http://terriblywrite.wordpress.com for thousands examples.

[Crof]

Thanks for the comment and the link, Katee. Webwriting won't improve until people reject the bad writing--and ridicule it.

[Justin Hui]

Promoting the Yahoo! name through a book and consolidating the image of Yahoo! in the readers mind. It's a marketing ploy to copy image over across the web, but it would still be worth a read! I find online sources better for web/online related material.

[Taylor Potter]

A writer-graphic artist that I am, I deem this book necessary for the improvement of a webpage as a whole. A lot of technology-related art for web pages could be done today because many software supported it but the content is left unnoticed. A writer that I am, I look the more into the content of a web than its design that's why I want to give my commendation to the writer of this book for taking a second look at web content writing. Every creator of corporate website designs or ecommerce web site designs and even social networking designs out there who aimed at social networking development and better online connections should read this book so that they will not be narcissistically blinded by the beauty and the glory of their designs. This, too, is a reminder for me now that I'm into making my own corporate web design.