Creating a Community Style Guide

Connection to Tech Comm

Wesley Mathis, ryan moeller, and Hannah Stevens presented “Enacting Social Justice in Technical Editing.” I gained some useful resources from the session, including The Subversive Copy Editor (2016) and The Conscious Style Guide. I care very much about how the issues I plan to discuss are languaged. Words matter. It occurred to me during the session that style guides themselves should be folded into the collection of assignments I am dreaming about.

At one point during the session, I stated that we need to “stop talking about it as a style guide and start thinking about it as a descriptive discussion of how and what we value when we talk about people and issues.” The idea is that style guides are prescriptive systems, editor and publisher centered. My idea was to draw on the prescriptive/descriptive understanding of grammar. There’s more to figure out, and I’m glad I attended both Part 1 & 2 of the session.