My Writing Style and Mannerisms

I saw Mike Sass write about his writing mannerisms on his blog Shellsharks, so I figured I’d do something similar.

These notes apply to my writings on Vale.Rocks more than anywhere else. When writing externally to this site, my words must often be editorialised, altered for the sake of adhering to style guidelines, or tailored to a specific audience.

Many other concepts are straight from the celebrated The Elements of Style. I do have disagreements with it though, and sometimes find it prioritises clarity at the cost of style. ¹

Evidently not everyone is a fan of my style, with the best insult I’ve received being that I’m a ‘hypergraphia-addled, graphomaniacal, logorrheic schizophrenic’. I won’t disagree that I am verbose, though I like to think not at the cost of clarity. My compulsion to write is not a pathology, as their words portray, and I’ve explained why I write in reasonable detail. I like to think their insult describes my literary flair.

I can pin a lot of my stylistic tendencies on the writers I’ve been most inspired by, namely Anthony Bourdain, Douglas Adams, and Hunter S Thompson. Authors with a style so distinct you can pick their prose out of a lineup and who can make the poor or mundane interesting

Excluding repeating the obvious and that already outlined by The Elements of Style, here are the mannerisms and stylistic choices/impulsions of my writing as I’ve noticed:

• I tend to write with jargon and specialised technical vocabulary. I think rather highly of people who read my work and assume they’re literate and capable of operating a search engine or dictionary if need be. I’m careful not to use these terms for the sake of it, but I also don’t bother lowering to the lowest possible denominator.

• I use Australian English. You can expect extra ‘u’s, a lack of ‘z’s, words like ‘doona’, and spellings such as ‘gaol’. If you ever see something attributed to me with American spellings, I either didn’t write it, am too far gone and should be shot, or lost a fisticuffs with an editor.

• I use metric units unless context necessitates imperial.

• I use gender-neutral pronouns (they, them) rather than the explicitly masculine or feminine when addressing people generally or someone whose preferred pronouns I’m not certain of.

• I’m fairly aggressive with breaking up prose into paragraphs. This is equal parts my preferred writing style and wish to cater to the weaknesses of the web by providing visual checkpoints. Due to the latter reason, I also use text styles whenever viable.

• I tend to write semi-formally but am not beyond jokes, references, and the occasional colloquialism. I like to think I write in the equivalent of a smart casual dress code.

• When first learning the ins and outs of writing in primary school, I latched onto complex sentences and have yet to let go.

• I am an Oxford/serial comma evangelist. It helps with readability, and I like them. They’re important for avoiding ambiguity. I will fight you on this.

• I love en dashes. I don’t use many em dashes, though. I’m not American, nor an LLM.

• I use commas to achieve a speaking cadence as well as for defining structure.

• I strongly believe the contents of quotes shouldn’t generally be messed with. This includes using logical punctuation to avoid altering content within quotation marks. I do permit myself the use of stylings and further details like metric conversions within quotes, though they should not be displayed inline with text, and I make it obvious that they are additive.

  • Long quotations are displayed in blockquotes and without quotation marks.

• I use single quotes, with double quotes nested within them, as is expected in Australian English.

• Dates are written in the order day, month, year.

• I hate writing dialogue and will avoid it whenever possible.

• I avoid dating my work. Writing that something happened ‘two weeks ago’ will be inaccurate and dated a week from now. A thing did not happen recently; it happened on [date]. If I have no other option, I will include ‘at the time of writing’ or ‘at the time of publication’.

• When including links, I will use them inline. I also use a lot of links, as it tends to be how I refer to referenced content and additional reading. I do try to avoid links being required for understanding my content and instead have them serve as supplementary information.

  My links are always provided with readable names, not things like ‘here’. This is for purposes of accessibility.

• I don’t put quotations around the titles of works but will italicise them.

• I love a good semicolon and will find excuses to use them.

• Always addicted to alliteration, I ardently apply it at any and all availabilities.

• I am prone to using ‘though’ as a crutch for bad writing.

• I use italics for emphasis of key terms or concepts and for imbuing conversational emphasis.

• Personal titles (Mr, Ms, etc) are generally omitted. They are superfluous in most cases.

• Acronyms and initialisms are written without full stops – ‘AI’, not ‘A.I.’. I dislike using full stops within sentences and feel they should be reserved for indicating the end of a sentence. This also applies to eg, ie, etc.

• I have a tendency to define terms and then use them as if they are common terms of art.

• Sometimes I write directly to the reader. I enjoy this deeply but know that I am writing principally for myself, with the expectation that the reader will follow. I cannot dream to cover what every reader may wish, so I must not inflict or obsess over the hypothetical. I thank you, dear reader, for understanding.

• I tend not to use underlines or bold too frequently. Underlines on the web are largely associated with hyperlinks, and even though Vale.Rocks’ hyperlinks are styled differently, I still err on the side of caution. I bold things occasionally, but I do often find it draws the eye too much and can be distracting, so I do it scarcely.

• I incorporate parenthetical remarks and occasionally footnotes/endnotes/sidenotes. These are a way to provide further information without disrupting text and a way to branch off from otherwise linear writing.

  • References to these come after punctuation.

• While I do generally conform to the expectation that content within parenthesis is optional – that is, completely removable from a sentence without impact – sometimes I just want to interject a quick little whatever and use it as an aside.

  Usually when a footnote would be too much, but leaving the information out would be detrimental. You can argue this is sloppy writing, and I have no defence.

• Post and header titles are styled in title case or as written in the source when referencing.

• I make use of modern punctuation. ‘?!’ becomes an interrobang: ‘‽’.

• Items in lists follow sentence case, unless they are presented as an extension of an already begun sentence.

• Admonitions are used for important material which it is imperative the reader must be privy to.

• I really do quite enjoy using ‘one’ as an indefinite pronoun.

• I use a single space after full stops, unless using certain typewriters.

• As a general rule I don’t use emojis. I find them distracting in text and generally find I can convey most concepts better with written words. There are also accessibility concerns.

• The contents of explanatory codeblocks are kept as simple as possible.

• Andy Bell once picked me up on my use of ‘this’ in my writing, and I’ve been wary of it since. Any time I remove ‘this’, ‘that’, or ‘it’, is usually for the better, except when referring to the subject by name becomes repetitive.

• I use headings for differentiating sections. Heading level 1 is taken by titles, and I try to only use heading levels 2 and 3 in writing. Going beyond that feels too granular and usually indicates a problem in structure.

• When I am writing micros on social media or in chats, I employ more colloquialisms and g-drops. I love a good g-drop when writin’.

Though in the end, all my writing is written to read, and I make my considerations accordingly. Rules must be warped where required – not to say that these are rules, merely notes of how I write.

Footnotes

1. It advises omitting needless words, but I don’t always think this necessary. Many short phrases are used so often that the reader’s eye glosses over them and considers them no more than they would a single word. This functional compression of multiple words into what the reader parses only as a single is something to benefit from, not repress, in some cases.

   It also suggests using commas rather than semicolons in the case of short clauses. I disagree, because I love semicolons. It considers ‘etc’ to often be better substituted, but I really like using etc as a way to continue on with more items in a succinct manner.

   I fear that in some cases the book is rigid and unyielding to language’s natural fluidity. This is evidenced in that many of the terms complained about in the book are now commonplace. One bit of advice I particularly disregard is not suffixing ‘-ise’. ↩