Presentational elegance or "house style"

- Presentational elegance is something that many writers overlook, but it can make a big difference to how others perceive your work. By presentational elegance, I mean much more than just clearing up the typos and the spelling mistakes in your copy, which is, of course, very important. The concept I'm going to teach you here is something called house style. There are style rules that create a distinctiveness through consistency in the way that things are written. You'd be surprised how far major newspapers go to ensure consistency on so many different levels. In fact, many publications have their own official style guides that go into minute detail about these issues. Everything from how you should refer to a particular country, to whether or not a particular word should be capitalized, or hyphenated or not. Style rules are brought in to give a flavor of unity to the writing. If you have a blog, you too can give it a look of consistency or orderliness using this idea of house style. It's basically about having principles about how you refer to things like, say, book titles, are they always written in italics, or do you put them inside quotation marks when you mention a book. Decide whether you're writing U.S. or UK English, where some words are spelled differently, like color. It will give all of us more confidence in you as a writer when your writing appears to have some kind of discipline to it. When you bring a sense of order to your writing, it makes you seem more authoritative as well. So, in what areas of your writing could style rules come in handy, let's think about that. One area is headings. Should all your headings start every word with a capital letter in them? Or should only the first letter of the first word in the headline have a capital letter. For example, The Economist writes headlines like this. The Wall Street Journal may write the same thing like this. In a book, how do you want your chapter headings to look. Here are some variations. Should your subheadings match the main headings' style, exactly or be different in some way. The thing is to try to avoid inconsistency, unless there's an artistic reason for having inconsistency. You can go really deep with this, way beyond the question of headlines. Think about punctuation. Do you want your dashes looking which of the following ways. Decide which one of those that you prefer, and stick to it throughout at least that piece of writing. And don't mistake it for a hyphen, for instance. Whether it's a cover letter for a job, a report for work, or a blog article, you'll do well by bringing this degree of order into your writing at the presentational level. Orderliness has a resonance all by itself, so take the trouble to create a beautiful house style for yourself. People may eventually recognize your style after a while, your writing may be recognizable just by its look, the way the headlines are, the way that the paragraphs are arranged, and everything will point towards a certain identity. There's a controversial matter, say, of the Oxford comma. The Oxford comma in that example is the comma that comes after the word pen, which isn't strictly necessary because it's the second last item in the list, and many people wouldn't use a comma there, the Oxford comma is where you do, even in the second last item, include a comma. Some people don't like it, others do. And you might decide to have a more intricate rule around Oxford commas, like, as some people do, you use the comma only when you have more complex items within a list, where it helps to distinguish those items better, like this. And if you have that kind of rule, your focus is mainly on clarity. But fundamentally, it's about bringing order to your writing through these style rules. Decide, for instance, how you'll highlight words that you want to emphasize, do you wanna underline these words, italicize them, or bold them. Decide how you'll refer to movies, there's many different ways that you could do it, have a look. Don't write movie titles one way on one page of your book and then in a different way on the next page. You're looking to create consistency, presentational elegance. It gives the impression of being very, very professional. If you introduce a person within a piece of writing, whom you refer to as John Davis, and if you mention him later on, do you say John Davis again, or Mr. Davis, with a full stop after the word mister, or just Davis. In newspapers, you sometimes get style rules around numbers. Some say to write out numbers one to nine as words, but use figures from the number 10 upwards. But what about when you have a mathematical formula, or have to start a sentence with the number 11, for example, and will you say "There's a 20% chance it will rain today." Or "There's a 20 per cent chance it will rain today." Where percent is written out as two different words. Or, where percent is written out as one word. Keep it consistent. How will you introduce organizations and later refer back to them. For instance, will you say The United Nations on first mention, and later The UN, once you've spelled it out the first time. Or will you write on first mention, this. Where the UN is in brackets. What's your house style, with quote marks, will you put the commas and full stops inside the quote marks, like the Wall Street Journal does, like this? Or outside, like the Guardian does? It can depend on the country you're in, as well. But whichever you use, keep that consistent throughout, or it's gonna look inelegant. Will you use rounded quote marks, the diagonal ones, or the vertical straight-lined ones. Will you say UK and U.S. like this, with dots in between each letter, or without? Keep that consistent. So I hope you see that having a house style can bring a critical layer of elegance to your writing. Sure, you can write great things without this sort of care towards your presentation, but great writing, like great food, becomes even more lovely when it's presented beautifully.