The Yahoo! Style Guide

I paid the full price of $23.99 for the Yahoo! Style Guide with some misgivings. Yahoo!’s homepage has become an overstuffed amalgam of the worst kind of clickbait (“Does this teen’s dress reveal too much?”), promotions of its own products with news-like headlines, a trending list of items no one’s thought about for months, and ads for things nobody needs. Five minutes on the site and I want to wipe my face with a hot towel.
Another concern was the guide’s publication date: 2010. You don’t need a cliché to express how long five years is in Internet time. I feared that the instant I click on Add to Cart, pallets of new editions would be loaded into trucks headed for bookstores and Amazon warehouses everywhere.
Much of the copy editing I do is web based these days, however, so I bought the book, figuring I’d get at least a few pointers.
I was wrong.
This book is an essential source for anyone who plans to write something longer than a tweet. The amount of useful advice in its 512 pages is enormous.
Don’t think of it as a style guide in the sense of the Associate Press’ Stylebook. Go by its subtitle: “The ultimate sourcebook for writing, editing, and creating content for the digital world.” The guide goes beyond an alphabetical listing of word usage (though there is that) and provides the guide’s users with the hows and whys of Web writing. Clarity, consistency, and conciseness are prime points, all practiced on Yahoo!’s own site even at its worst, and all usually ignored by other sites that pay large sums to page designers but consider good, tight copy an unnecessary expense.
The tone of the book is not what I would have expected from a company that uses an exclamation point in its name. It’s conversational but never cute like other guides targeted for general audiences. The closest to it I can think of would be Amy Einsohn’s excellent The Copyeditor’s Handbook. The guide is logically organized and visually clear. Each chapter ends with an exercise that many will find helpful for review, even when scanned later.
The last section, Resources, is more technical and involves coding for the Web, SEO, and legal issues. Readers will know what parts of this they can skip, but it would be wise to read them all as they’re written for laypeople and being conversant in Web issues always helps. Besides, some of the guide’s many bits of wisdom are in this section, including one on page 437 any copyeditor—maybe, especially, the one writing this review—can always use:

Choose your battles. Be prepared to defend your editorial choices: Know how a point of consistency or style affects the site’s credibility, readability, navigability, searchability, and so forth. But while you defend, don’t be defensive; be positive, helpful, and open to changing the decision. Consider which points are deal breakers—you wouldn’t compromise on the spelling of the company name, for example—and which points have a lower priority or are hard to fix, such as news-feed headlines that automatically appear in title case on a page that otherwise uses sentence case.