Sigrid Kronenberger wrote:
Hello @all,
Lou Iorio <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> schrieb:
Jean Hollis Weber wrote:
Now that I'm home again and have access to my reference library, I
pulled down a selection of books to see how software vendor manuals
and commercial computer-related books handle heading capitalisation,
and what my style guides say.
Several of my style guides and books on technical editing don't
mention the topic at all (other than to say "don't use ALL CAPS").
What are these style guides, and what style capitalization does each
use?
What is the reason for asking? Why are you still complaining?
To be fair, Jean is the one who brought the subject up again (since she
promised to give more info when she got back home, and now she's home).
However, I think that the point that sentence-style capitalization is
widely used and accepted has been amply demonstrated. A war of reference
books doesn't add any more useful information.
As does the Chicago Manual of Style. These are the first two style
guides cited in the
OOAuthors style guide. The third is a general reference to "MLA
guidelines", which
appear to me to focus on research papers and scholarly writing. I
would not include this
in the style guide, but in fact, they also use headline
capitalization.
And? Why can't we rely on a style guide, which focus on research papers
and writing for schools?
I think the main reason for including the MLA guidelines was that some
version of it is more likely to be on the bookshelf of contributors,
because they might have gotten it while in school. Most people don't
have copies of CMS or Read Me First unless they are in the publishing or
software fields (and most software tech writers I know use Microsoft's
style guide, not Sun's). We didn't want people to feel that they had
spend money on reference books just to work on this project. MLA is fine
for guidance on things like grammar and punctuation.
Our style guide states that the other guides are "a complement" to it.
Maybe that needs to be worded more strongly to say that our style guide
"takes precedence" over the others. We could also add notations about
what topics each one is recommended for.
--
Janet Swisher --- Senior Technical Writer
Enthought, Inc. http://www.enthought.com
