PublicWongery:Manual of Style
This Manual of Style refers to orthographical and grammatical conventions used in the Wongery. For other conventions of content and presentation, see Wongery:Conventions.
While this is the style followed by the Grandmaster Wongers, contributors to the Public Wongery and to Private Wongeries are not required to follow them. We state them here, however, for users' information in case anyone is interested in ensuring that their own articles match the same style as those in the Central Wongery. (Also, while the Grandmaster Wongers won't require that other contributors follow the Manual of Style, we would definitely prefer that they do. For whatever that's worth.)
Grammar and spelling
Material in the Central Wongery follows certain guidelines of spelling and grammar. Again, articles in the Public Wongery and Private Wongeries are not required to follow these guidelines, though they should still use proper grammar and spelling. (For reference to aid in this endeavor, the Public Wongery contains lists of frequently misspelled and frequently confused words, and other similar articles.)
Regional differences
Regardless of their own nationalities, the Grandmaster Wongers use American spellings and vocabularies for consistency. This means that in the Wongery, for instance, a portable electrical light source is a flashlight, not a torch; the element with atomic number 13 is aluminum, not aluminium; the suffix "-ize" is spelled with a "z" and there is no u in "color" or "favor", and so on.
This guideline is not strongly applicable to editors of the Public Wongery and Private Wongeries; editors there are free to write their articles in whatever standard variety of English they are most comfortable with. However, the variety of English used should be consistent within a given article. (Note that the Wongery is an English-language site, and articles in other languages are discouraged. We do hope someday to have versions of the Wongery in other languages.)
Pronouns
The Wongery uses the Singular "they" to refer to persons of undefined or unspecified gender, as in "a Grandmaster Wonger tries to stick to their conventions". While often assumed to be nonstandard, the singular "they" in fact has a long history in the English language, and has the advantage of not presuming a male gender as a default.
It's true that the singular "they" is not the only possible way to accomplish this goal, but it seemed to us to be the most desirable. Writing "he or she" or "he/she" each time an indefinite pronoun was needed struck us as ugly and unwieldy, and alternating masculine and feminine pronouns in successive uses as an awkward workaround of obtrusive artificiality. "It" has never been in common use as an ungendered pronoun for animate beings. The panoply of neologistic pronouns that have been coined for the purpose are too narrowly used to come across as other than strained and strident, and the resurrection of the pronouns that used to be used in certain localized dialects for the purpose would be no less so. (We admit we kind of like some of those recently coined pronouns, like "E", "jhe", and "xe" (though we're not at all sure how those last two are supposed to be pronounced), but we still think it would be counterproductive to try to make their use standard practice in the Wongery.)
(Okay, I wasn't sure about how those last two are supposed to be pronounced until just now when I searched for references on them. According to Wiktionary, "xe" is pronounced /zi/, and according to a webpage on epicene pronouns, "jhe" is pronounced /dʒi/. So there you go.)
We understand that the use of "their" as a gender-neutral pronoun might seem jarring to many people. Actually, there's enough of the grammatical prescriptivist in us that it makes us wince a little, too. But we still think it preferable to using the male pronoun as the default, and that it's probably less jarring than any of the other alternatives. Still, it's still unnatural enough for us that there may be many places that we slipped up and did use the masculine pronoun in defiance of this convention, but we'll try to correct those errors as we find them.
Plurals
In the case of proper nouns ending in "s" or "z", or at least of certain proper nouns ending in s or z, one convention is to simply leave the plural identical to the singular: Mark and Mary Hodges jointly make up the Hodges. The Wongery does not follow this convention; rather, in the Wongery such proper nouns simply add -es. Our hypothetical Mark and Mary are the Hodgeses, apparent awkwardness notwithstanding. (And incidentally, adding an apostrophe to make the plural—the Hodges'—isn't even a stylistic choice; it's just wrong.) There may be rare exceptions, such as proper nouns ending in silent s or x, such as Louis; the kings of France have included eighteen Louis (not Louises, and certainly not Louis').
Where a noun has either an irregular or regular plural, the irregular plural is preferred according to the Wongery convention. (We're just weird like that.) However, please make sure the irregular plural is correct; there are many common pluralization errors.
Apostrophes
Although some grammar authorities allow the use of apostrophes to form the plurals of numerals, single letters, and short words like "and"—hence "3's", "x's", "and's"—, the convention in the Wongery is that plurals are always formed without apostrophes—hence "3s", "xs", "ands". Though this may in some unusual cases lead to apparent ambiguity (does "is" refer to multiple instances of the letter i, or to the third-person present singular of the verb "to be"?), we are confident that in most if not all such cases the context will make the meaning clear, and feel that the consistency of this construction outweighs the tiny risk of ambiguity.
The Wongery's convention is that the possessive of a proper noun ending in s is formed by the addition of "'s", not merely an apostrophe. This, for instance, "Gus's shoe", not "Gus' shoe".
Diacriticals and ligatures
Whenever the use of a diacritical mark may be considered correct (though optional), the Wongery convention is to use it. This includes words like coöperate and reëvaulate, where the Wongery style will use diacriticals even though pretty much nobody else does. This is probably silly, but we just like diacriticals. The same goes for ligatures; we'll write "æon", not "aeon", and "amœba", not "amoeba" (and certainly not "eon" and "ameba"). Yes, these ligatures are rapidly obsolescing, but we like them enough that we'll use them anyway. Even we have our limits, though, and don't use these ligatures on every possible word; we'll stop short, for instance, of writing "Ægypt" or "œconomics".
Punctuation and spacing
In addition to the spelling and grammar, the Wongery also follows (or strives to follow) certain conventions of punctuation and spacing.
Comma
The Wongery style encourages the use of the Oxford comma (or serial comma). That is, in a list of three or more items, a comma should precede the conjunction in the end: "A, B, and C", not "A, B and C". This is not because we believe that the Oxford comma is objectively more correct or necessarily better avoids ambiguity; it's simply our preference.
Dashes
Long dashes in the Wongery are written not as successive hyphens (--), but as em dashes (—). An em dash can easily be inserted by simply typing "—". Shorter dashes—as for instance used to represent subtraction—are similarly represented with en dashes, "–". Thus, for instance, "3 – 2—a simple problem" becomes "3 – 2—a simple problem". (Note that there are spaces before and after the en dash, but not the em dash. And speaking of spacing...)
Spacing
The Wongery style includes double spaces at the ends of sentences. Of course, this is somewhat moot in wiki articles and other text posted on the web, since whitespace in HTML is condensed to a single space anyway, but this convention will become more relevant when and if the Wongery publishes printed material.
There's a widespread belief that double spaces at the ends of sentences are an unnecessary relic of the age of the typewriter and have been rendered obsolete by proportional fonts, and that those who now expect double spaces do so only in ignorance of their superannuation. This, however, is a myth; using single or double spaces at the end of a sentence is simply a matter of stylistic preference, and though at the moment the single space seems to be in the ascendance, at the Wongery, we decidedly prefer the double space. Sentences should, in our opinion, be set apart by noticeably larger spaces than appear between words within a sentence.
Quotation marks
According to the Wongery convention, punctuation in quotation marks works the same as in parentheses: when a quote comes at the end of the sentence or clause, the Wongery convention is to put the ending punctuation mark inside the quotation marks if it is a part of the quoted text, and outside otherwise. For instance: "He said, 'I wouldn't do that.'", but "I'll call you 'Mr. Smiley'."
Admittedly, this goes against the standard American convention that periods always go inside quotation marks, but we're sticking to our convention anyway because we think the standard American convention in this matter illogical and undesirable. Yes, we've said elsewhere that we're not interested in being in the vanguard of any sort of linguistic change or reformation, and our insistence on this convention may seem to conflict with that. We are horribly inconsistent. (Or I guess maybe we contain multitudes, if you're into Whitman.)