'Bushwhacked'
[NAFDA] Spike-centric discussion. Lusty, lewd (only occasionally crude), risqué (and frisqué), bawdy (Oh, lawdy!), flirty ('cuz we're purty), raunchy talk inside. Caveat lector.
Who besides me likes Fred's style the best because it capitalizes all of the title instead of just the first word - just like we were taught as kids?
AMA style is to only capitalize the first word (and proper nouns) in articles, but to capitalize all the words for book titles. It gets weirder with internet references, because you have to decide if a reference is equivalent to an article or a book, and capitalize accordingly.
APA is the same. And it BUGS.
Stephanie Lastname, I Thought This Shirt Was Clean: A Study of the Effects of Laundering on Fur Deposits in Common Fabrics, 53 Annals of Household Animal Fur Research 234-57 (2014).
Heh. Whereas in my head, I was all For more information, see (conref link: external)I Thought This Shirt Was Clean: A Study of the Effects of Laundering on Fur Deposits in Common Fabrics (/conref link: external) by Stephanie Lastname.
Then our content tools would throw a hissy-fit over an external link, and I'd have to go in to the schema and make the appropriate magic gestures to it renders. Then explain to one of the PMs that the information already exists, created by someone more knowledgable on the subject than us, so there's no point to my rewriting it, and hey do they have the new UI screens for me yet? No? Then stop bothering me.
despite re-reading it a half-dozen times, I managed to leave the 2013 on it
My boss just sent me a flyer. She said cheerfully "there's no deadline!" There's a deadline printed in red at the top of the first page - it's the same date we're going to press.
It's amazing what you can miss when you're proofreading. This is why I proofread twice when I can, and always appreciate a second set of eyeballs.
Oh, we link shit, too (right in the Word doc I'm editing, which drives me bonkers, because if I accidentally click on a reference title, my browser helpfully pops up with that website), but I don't have anything to do with the formatting of it. It all gets styled before I ever see it.
If you would just get a job with this journal, you wouldn't have to worry so much about tiny aspects of style:
Who besides me likes Fred's style the best because it capitalizes all of the title instead of just the first word - just like we were taught as kids?
We only capitalize the first word in article titles, but all the words in book, journal, and magazine titles. IEEE style is the same as Chicago, except where it isn't.
And of course everyone has very good reasons for doing it the way they do, even though it drives other people nuts.
I would like to know how they all came up with their respective styles. Who decided? Like, IEEE based theirs on Chicago, but why they made the seemingly arbitrary changes they made, I don't know. And then some IEEE journals do things a little differently, just because they want to, which seems to defy the point of having a style manual, but I just work here.
which seems to defy the point of having a style manual
We have a style manual -- a big-ass book you can buy -- and we STILL do things that contradict it. The style manual says that "a quarter" is fine for "one fourth" as long as it's not meant to be an actual measurement of a drug/test result, whatever. But you could say "a quarter of Americans think Steph is awesome," and that would be fine. It says, verbatim, that "a quarter" is fine for "one fourth" IN THE STYLE MANUAL.
My boss sent me feedback this week when I left "a quarter" in an article, saying " 'a quarter' should be 'one fourth' per the style manual." So I emailed her back and told her I looked it up (and cited the page) and that's why I left it in. So she emailed back and said "Bigger Boss prefers 'one fourth'." And I thought, you are SO busted, lady. Don't lie to me about the style manual when you know I can look it up. Just tell me that Bigger Boss, for whatever weird reason, prefers to go against the style manual, and I'll make a note of it and do that, too.
That was ridic, though. Tell me one thing that's provably untrue? Kind of out of character for her. I think she was having a bad day, because she doesn't do stuff like that.
But yeah, it's hilarious how we have a published manual and STILL the AMA Authorities just decide they want to do something different. For no apparent reason other than -- I swear to you this has been given as the reason -- "they don't like it."