Don’t be fooled into thinking that style is any less important than substance

Every news organisation, from the grand national broadcasters to upstart websites, has a style guide of some description. It’s the set of rules that makes life easier for reporters, avoids newsroom arguments, and makes sure readers aren’t lost in a fog of inconsistency.

Some style guides are gargantuan beasts, painstakingly compiled by editors over years, others barely stretch to a couple of sides of A4 for the most essential elements.

The basics are obvious. We need hard and fast rules for how to write out currencies, how to refer to high court judges, which profanities to asterisk into oblivion, or the form of words to take when reporting from disputed territories.

When journalists move from one organisation to another, the changes can seem jarring. At The Independent our default style for dates is “5 February”. After 15 years writing “Feb 5” in a previous job this still feels like the most appalling heresy. I’ll get over it. In time.

In most style guides, or at least in the accompanying unwritten rules that exist in the newsroom hive mind, there is a “banned list”. This is the ragtag collection of cliches, flaccid phrases or affectations that have angered enough chief subs over the years to have been culled from the pages altogether (they hope).

And so elephants in the room should be sparingly deployed; tips of icebergs rarely glimpsed. Woe betide those who sign off their article with the energy-sapping “it remains to be seen”.

Rules are there to be broken of course. Sometimes this is for the sake of accuracy (there was actually an elephant in the kitchen perhaps); sometimes simply to allow the story to flow.

There was a time when such things were decided on a whim. One story (that may or not be true) is that an editor at the Daily Mirror once called the newsdesk during a boozy lunch to insist that a headline ellipsis should, from that day forth, be two dots not three, just to prove to his dining companions the raw power he could wield.

No such laxity here of course. The Independent style guide is concise and sober, concerned with delivering guidance that makes life easier for reporters to write stories that make sense for readers. The only moment of alarm in the guide – when even exclamation marks are deployed – revolves around the tricky question of “curly quotes” rather than straight.

Whether any readers would ever know the difference, of course, remains to be seen.

Yours,

Joel Dimmock

Voices deputy editor