Saturday 15 April 2017

Italics and quotes and suchlike

New Pony episode today! Woooooooo!

Also, Equestria Daily briefly carried a story yesterday stating that clips from the forthcoming movie were shown at a coin in Thailand. The article quickly disappeared, though. Maybe the information was wrong, maybe the piece was incorrectly scheduled, maybe someone from Hasbro had a quiet word. If the screening did happen, I imagine we'll hear about it from an attendee soon enough.

This is one of those silly little posts that I couldn't find anywhere else to place, so you're getting it on its own. You may be surprised by the revelation that I have something approaching a personal style guide for Louder Yay. It's changed and evolved a little over the years, but at the moment this is what I try to do:

I italicise the show's name: My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. The same holds for its various abbreviations, such as FiM. There's a difference between "the Pony world", which refers to canon, the fandom, etc, and "the pony world", which is the one Fluttershy lives in.

Episode names get quotes: "Hurricane Fluttershy". Episode numbers are in the form S5E01. I tend to write out "Season Seven" or whatever in full the first time, but I'm not all that strict about it and I may not continue with that in the long term.

Names: I use Minuette and Bulk Biceps, not Colgate and Snowflake. On the other hoof, I use Carrot Top and Derpy. Bon Bon/Sweetie Drops is a special case, as the right name may depend on context. In fanfic reviews, I'll use the name the author uses, even if that is "Golden Harvest" or "Bright Eyes".

I treat fanfics as books, so their names are italicised: Where They Understand You. Chapters within those fics get quotes: "Fast Times at Cloudsdale High".

Major fandom events are generally given their official styles: BronyCon, BUCK, UK PonyCon. Otherwise, I follow the common British convention of capping up only the first letter if the abbreviated form is pronounced as a word: Lego, Nato, etc. That's why I write "Fimfiction" and not "FiMFiction". I abbreviate to "Fimf" fairly often simply because I do so in real life, too.

Other major websites: I've recently switched back to using a lower-case q in EqD. I should have done that earlier. UK of Equestria is UK of E, not UKoE. Chris's site is OMPR. This site is LY, though I don't exactly need to abbreviate it very often!

I never capitalise "brony" – I don't see any reason that the word should be treated as a proper noun. I don't use it all that often anyway, though I don't object to being classed as one. I rarely use the word "pegasister" at all, but I don't see anything wrong with it beyond silliness – and why is that a bad thing anyway?

I try to avoid using numeric dates, in order to avoid confusing American readers. If I forget, then I'll be using the European standard of DD/MM/(YY)YY. And I may be a non-believer, but I still use the AD/BC I grew up with rather than CE/BCE. In the usual British way, I'm semi-metricated: temperatures will be in Celsius, but human heights will be in feet.

12 comments:

  1. "The one Fluttershy lives in". Hehe :)

    Minuette and Lego in the same blog, gosh! :D

    Admittedly I do normally Stylize it as "LEGO".

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    1. I think I've mentioned before my theory on that last thing: that people are more likely to follow official styling if they're deeply invested in the thing in question. You're much more into Lego than I am, hence the difference there. But I always write BUCK despite that also being written as a word, because I am (well, was...) deeply invested in that myself.

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    2. I think that's a fair point, and I certainly won't deny being deeply invested in LEGO. :)

      As a side note, I mentally kick myself every time I make a grammatical mistake that I know you're going to see, like the "Stylize" above. That's just how it is.

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    3. You should see all the errors I make! It's just that being the blog owner, I can edit most of mine out. ;)

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  2. This is definitely my kind of post :)

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  3. That's pretty similar to my style guide for just casual writing. My few differences:

    Verbs, including conjugations of "to be" are always capitalized in titles. So I write Friendship Is Magic and FIM, instead of Friendship is Magic and FiM.

    If a fanfic is analogous to a short story, I write the title is in quote marks. If a fic is analogous to a novella or novel (which in my mind means it has multiple chapters, or at least 20K words), then the title is italicized. But if I'm listing a bunch of stories in a single forum post, I'll choose one style and apply it to all the titles just for consistency's sake.

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    1. Until recently, I used to do that all-capping-up thing for song titles (but not book titles). I decided to stop it to make myself more consistent.

      95% of the fics I read are <20k, so there's not a lot of point in my adopting your boundary there! :P

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  4. I maintain that both the Brits and the Yanks are wrong, and that the only sensible way to do numerical dates are YY/MM/DD!

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    1. I actually use that format all the time for my photos etc. It is the best way. Trouble is, it's unwieldy to include the year every single time you want to quote a date, so it's not really a general-purpose answer.

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  5. "Also, Equestria Daily briefly carried a story yesterday stating that clips from the forthcoming movie were shown at a coin in Thailand. The article quickly disappeared, though. Maybe the information was wrong, maybe the piece was incorrectly scheduled, maybe someone from Hasbro had a quiet word. If the screening did happen, I imagine we'll hear about it from an attendee soon enough."

    That's bullshit. If it were true, you would have posted this on the movie thread on UKoE.

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    1. What's bullshit? Here's an archived (not by me) copy of the EqD page in question. Potential movie spoilers, of course:

      http://archive.is/G14hU

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