Wired Style: Principles of English Usage in the Digital Age

Wired magazine's top editors have weighed thousands of new terms, phrases, idioms, and usages of the language since the advent of the global village. Elements of Style is no longer sufficient as a guide to English usage--Wired America needs Wired Style.

In an effort to stay on top of changes not addressed in Strunk and White, AP, or The Chicago Manual of Style, Hale and her fellow editors at Wired magazine waded through the "shifting verbal currents of the post-Gutenberg era" to determine where jargon stops and the vernacular of digiculture begins. This annotated glossary includes technological terms, phrases, acronyms, and idioms commonly used on the Internet, World Wide Web, news groups, and online forums. Wired's style sheet shows how to incorporate an e-mail or Web address in prose, how to deal with hyphens, and how to make a plural of the computer mouse. Although they prefer mouses, mice is also acceptable. (Remarkably, Douglas Engelbart, who invented this ubiquitous pointing device in 1964, hadn't given the matter much thought.) By taking on the colloquial online voice, the editors reach into the heart of the Net to help writers who may be composing e-mail, business letters, term papers, or articles--anyone who wants to use the new parlance more effectively. This hardcover edition has concealed wire-O binding and a slipcase. Jennifer Henderson

Everyone today is traveling the information superhighway, surfing the net, sending and receiving E-mail, and creating a homepage. Along with the digital revolution come big changes in our language and word usage. The editors of Wired magazine take up these changes in this product of their new publishing division. The work looks at how the digital age has changed the way we write; it sets out to give a new set of rules to use along with Elements of Style and The Chicago Manual of Style. A large part of the book is lists of words and acronyms with definitions, e.g., "IRL?in real life?Online shorthand. All caps." The book looks like the magazine without the color; the binding is hardcover with concealed wire-o and slipcase. This interesting, artful, and inexpensive edition will find a niche in most collections.?Lisa J. Cihlar, Winfield P. L., Ill.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.