PFF Style Rules
A Guide For Story Editors

by

Oct 2003

Prologue

After a number of years and several hundred amatuer-written stories edited, I have noticed certain writing problems have surfaced regularly. To give my colleagues and successors a running start at this work, I list these problems and their cures below. Remember to always care for the authors. Gently correct their mistakes, but don't trample their voice by stamping your vocabulary, your phrasing, your style on theirs.

The Rules

  1. All numbers from zero to ninety-nine are spelled, not written in Arabic numerals. The compound numbers are hyphenated. Example: 22 should be twenty-two. Numerals are intrusive in text. Spell them out whenever it can be done succinctly. The numeral 3000 is a good candidate for spelling out; 3219 is not.
  2. Our writers often write "we landed about 15-20 rainbows". For easier reading, remove the weasel word "about". Next, make them look good and clean up the text by dropping the "15" and spelling twenty. There is another problem there, but it has become a collateral fatality: the hyphen between 15 and 20. A short dash, not a hyphen, should be used to separate numbers defining a range. If you want to get tech-ish type this code: – (ampersand, hash, 150, semi-colon). That's geek for a dash. To get "fifteen–twenty" to display on the screen, type this: fifteen–twenty.

    Our writers often write "it was 20" to 22". Again, spell the number. Again, make them look good and distill to twenty-two. Change the abbreviation for inches to the spelled word. If it seems better to include a range, a thicket of hyphens and short dashes could result: thirty-three–thirty-six twenty-two inch browns. I could have made it worse by hyphenating inch (hyphenating is allowed some arbitrariness). In this area of usage, sometimes rewriting the sentence a bit dodges the awkwardness.

  3. Our writers often use the possessive when they mean to use the plural. Sometimes you'll see the reverse.
  4. Names of flies must have at least the originator's initial capitalized: for example, royal Wulff. After trying various other style rules, I have lately adopted the position that they are something like titles and need to be set off from ordinary words. Now all words of the name of a fly are capitalized: for example, Pheasant Tail, Sparkle Pupa, and Royal Wulff.
  5. The concept of a paragraph is elusive. When the author of a submission seems to have no better organization scheme than "I wrote this first because it was the first thing I thought of, then I wrote this because it was the next thing I thought of", I find I must try to re-sort his thoughts into cogent paragraphs. (Sometimes I give up.) For those who seem to have some sense of organization and style, I mostly leave their paragraphs alone. There are two exceptions: really long paragraphs are harder to read on the web because, well, it is harder to read on a screen, so I break them if I can; sometimes I think that the connectivity of two short bits is strong and that they should be joined.
  6. Subheadings help both the readability and the scan-ability of articles read from a screen. You will have to supply those; the authors never do.
  7. Re-wording for clarity is required from time to time. An example from an actual submission:
    "They mostly struck right near the lip." From the context, you would have figured out that he meant the lip of the pool, but you would have had to stop and think about it and recall that a few sentences earlier he said he was fishing the lip of the pool. For clarity, I suffixed his sentence with "of the pool".
  8. Some of our writers have a colloquial style in writing that is clear and fun to read. Others have a colloquial style that is ambiguous and wandering. This second category's articles often needs a lot of editing. Joe Piazza might advise you to just put up what they send, but these bad-English articles would not be enjoyable (for me, at a minimum).
  9. Often, a writer will have meant something a bit different from what was explicitly written. What was meant is usually clear, but a kind editor (who will make the writers look good) will exchange the general or flaccid word for one more specific, more precise, or more colorful.
  10. You can't trust their spelling and spell check isn't the last word on the subject, either.
  11. Care to get into a dissertation on the proper time for that or which? I'm fussy, maybe too fussy, but I believe that when fine distinctions of meaning, grammar, and usage are lost, the ability to express precisely is diminished. Of course, those who rampage through the language can't tell the difference, but an editor must come to the rescue for the sake of himself and his brothers and sisters who can tell the difference.
  12. This is an easy one. Substitute who (or whom) for that in situations such as "People that like to fish from drift boats..."
  13. Titles of persons as proper nouns cause a lot of confusion. Here are the correct usages: President Cary and Mr. President (as an honorific combined with a proper name, as a form of direct address); "the president reported that..." and Mr. Cary is the president of the Peninsula Fly Fishers (as a reference to the person or the office).
  14. Place a comma before and as in: A, B, and C. Why that rule was ever made optional, I'll never know. It's use allows for clarity in more complex groupings.
  15. In compound sentences in which the compounded parts are conjoined with and or but, use a comma before the conjunction to separate the parts.
  16. Speaking of compound sentences—some of our contributors join sentences with and as if they were stringing pearls (a bad thing to carry over from conversational speech to written language). You will recognize when two thoughts are joined or not by sense. The sentence structure must reflect this. Join or unjoin sentences as required.
  17. Article titles and sub-headings are capitalized. I capitalize the articles and prepositions, too.
  18. If pictures are submitted, indicate where in the article the pictures should go. Supply a caption if called for. I don't put pictures in paragraphs, just between them. This is because the layout can get really messed up with different browsers, different monitor resolutions, different user default font specifications.

    Here's how to indicate where a picture goes: add this to the text: "put lost_creek_2.jpg here. caption: Mouth of Lost Creek". Refer to the individual pictures by the file name with which you send them along. The web editor may change the file name later, but this way he'll know which picture is indicated in each instance.

  19. The computer screen does not have the fine resolution of a printed page, therefore reading is a bit more laborious. To help the reader, web writing is generally constructed in smaller chunks: more simple sentences, shorter paragraphs. An example of the opposite is any of many policy advisory emails I have sent to the PFF board. They were a bastard to get through, weren't they?

Other Tips

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