If you are serious about sharing your stories and you are focused on asking the right questions, speed to publish, and tribe finding, you want to get certain recurring editing decisions taken care of in one fell swoop. You don’t want to be slowing the show down for low-value add editing activities.
Does this mean punctuation and style are not important? No. It just means that they are not that important to catalyzing change. Remember, your readers are more interested in the story itself and what it means than in its style and punctuation.
That being said there are conventions that we can all jump in and use.
For our Canadian work we rely on the Canadian Press Stylebook, CP Style as we say in the newsroom. It’s a big thick book, 478 pages. It’s a well accepted convention.
Here are three good C’s to recommend the use of CP Style or something like it:
Credibility
By using a well-known, disciplined convention like CP Style you strengthen your credibility. Your stories are in the public domain where people are used to reading news and have become accustomed to news conventions. If your style is different than what they are used to they may be left with a sense that something isn’t quite right, or that you don’t know what you are doing. If you court media attention with your stories, using a media convention strengthens your credibility with them. Many business writers who use style guides will also be familiar with these conventions.
Consistency
Some organizations have developed a style of their own for internal documents. The way peoples’ titles are capped or not, how abbreviations are done, and how program names are presented are examples. Items like hyphenation are also often-encountered debates.
We all want our written work to ‘hang together’ well. That’s why it can be tempting to apply an internal style guide to your public domain stories for the sake of consistency, but it actually makes more sense to go the other way. If your internal documents conform to a generally-accepted convention you can build a consistency that works on the inside and on the outside. It’s a lot easier to hand out copies of CP Style book than it is to create your own style and teach it to others in your organization. Rather than repeatedly making the same changes to everyone’s writing you can build familiarity with the CP Style book over time and focus your efforts on other communications improvements.
Cost
When everyone is singing from the same song sheet you save money and get your stories out faster. If there is an editing process that reinvents the style wheel stories slow down. You lose story momentum and focus. More resources are consumed getting stories out, usually without any real value-add for the reader. Sticking with an accepted convention saves valuable resources for more powerful story-gathering activities.
You need time to obsess. It’s a good skill to have. Use it obsessing on things like asking the right questions, speed to publish, and tribe finding.
Read More:
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