Quote:
Originally Posted by cybmole
Hitch - thanks for the link.
I am curious as to how style "rules" such as the detailed ones for quotation marks come into being - have they just evolved during history of publishing then gotten written down?
do big book publishers have style "bibles" in which all such things are documented or is that left to academia?
do printed book publishers have automated tools to check / enforce such styles?
back with the spell checker issue - a UK to US spelling converter & vice-versa plug in could be a future nice-to-have . I assume that conversion tables already exist online somewhere, at least for the most common terms - like color/colour?
|
Mostly, it's been that the rules have come into being by usage over the centuries; playwrights, in the English world, and Biblical scholars have had the most influence on the printed word. And, yes, there are style "bibles" that editors, publishers and printers use.
Here at the good ship Booknook {cough, cough}, we mostly make it up as we go along, WITHIN the reasonable rules of correct punctuation usage, due to the ever-changing technology, primarily hyphenation, right now. Emdashes and endashes are a giant PITA, as we can never know whence the book will go (i.e., a device that DOES hyphenate, even if schizophrenically, like the Nook, or one that does NOT the K1-K3's)...and as we have folks who have come from all walks of life here, on both sides of the counter (us and the customers), we try very hard to refrain from correcting anyone. We don't, unless contracted, perform proofreading or editing services; if we tried to fix every wrong thing that came through the door, I'd be bankrupt in a week. We see some mighty scary writing in here (and some amazingly GOOD, too, I must say!).
And you guys already suffered through my mini-tantrum about the dreaded 4-dot "ellipsis."
ARGGGHHHHH.
I am glad if I have been able to provide you with a truly useful link; so much of what is out there on the Net is such garbage, when I find little treasures like that, which I can give to my clients (or other good folks), I like to hang on to them.
HTH,
Hitch