The Daily Telegraph (or should that be the Telegraph or the Telegraph Media Group?) is updating its style book. For those who don’t know, that’s not a primer in literary pretension. It’s a manual that lists preferences in spellings (realise instead of realize, Lyons instead of Lyon) and typographical styles (“Italicise titles of books, films, plays and paintings”), rules on such things as hyphenation and picture captions (“Don’t tell the readers what they can see for themselves”) and, quite often, a sizeable number of banned words (one editor hated to see children described as “kids”; another is said to have decreed that God might “reveal” but The Daily Telegraph should merely “disclose”).
The point of a style book, according to my copy of our own, is “to provide conformity and ensure that we are all speaking the same language. The style should help to imbue the newspaper with individuality. To echo the introduction to a previous style book: ‘Its aims are accuracy, immediacy, clarity and readability. And the greatest of these is not clarity but accuracy.’”
The trouble is that style books, like styles, can quickly go out of fashion. Ours, according to one of those charged with its updating, has rules regarding mentions of Acid House parties, duffel coats, the Princess of Wales and juvenile courts — but no rules on Mumbai, al-Qa’eda, BSkyB and youth courts. It needs work.
It also needs to reflect the fact that we are now publishing in podcasts and videos and blogs as well as in print. Do we need a guide to pronunciation, like the one the BBC has, for those making podcasts? How should a reporter sign off on video? How flexible should we be about style in blogs? Can we allow bloggers to use words that wouldn’t normally appear in print?
Matthew Arnold once wrote: “People think I can teach them style. What stuff it is. Have something to say and say it as clearly as you can. That is the only secret of style.” If only it were that simple.