PEREGRINE PULP
THE PE’ PUL’S STYLE and GRAMMAR GUIDE
CONCISE VERSION
(First edition)
FONTS
The PP Style Guide permits and prefers a variety of fonts. Font options include:
• Sans serif fonts such as: Calibri, Lucida Sans Unicode, and Proxima Nova
• Serif fonts such as: American Typewriter, Georgia, and Roboto Serif
We recommend these fonts because they are legible, widely available, and because they include special characters such as math symbols and Greek letters. (Use of the dastardly Arial, Helvetica, or Times New Roman is forbidden. Punishment for their use will be doled out in the afterlife, surely.)
Except for headings and titles, font size should be a little smaller than you might like, however that feels in context. As a general rule, 11-point is great but 10-point is better. At this time, 12-point remains a violation against Being.
PARAGRAPH ALIGNMENT
Text should be justified and not left ragged (aka “uneven”). The reason for this is because it looks great in print and in full-screen digital formats but terrible on phones. The internet was not built for phones and remains delightfully unfriendly to them. (I mean, not even Google can figure it out.) And let's keep it that way.
LANGUAGE
Canadian English is a hybrid language born out of the absurd palimpsest that is English. As such, Canadian should be written using with great inconsistency and variation, with whimsical applications of American, British, and French spellings. This is done to enhance linguistic differentiation and confound and annoy non-Canadians. More weird Australianisms should be adopted and employed.
Imperial and metric measurements should be situationally appropriate or used to make a point and not applied based on national convention or common usage within a field of study or practice. You're trying to convey ideas and make sense, not follow some dumb protocol.
PP Style promotes writing in your own voice. As such, anything reading as you or your audience could be heard in casual conversation is ideal. And if that means tenses flip and flop around and passive and active voice shift from line to line then, well, so be it.
BIAS-FREE LANGUAGE
The same people who insist objectivity is impossible and not even a worthy goal within journalism or scholarship, say, or who enthusiastically downgrade science to a religion also love to simultaneously gift us entire publications and even disciplines directed at reducing and exterminating so many highly fecund species of noxious bias. I understand that making sense is not what they're about but they could give consistency a try. No obligations. They could just dabble in it occasionally. They might like it.
QUIRKY SPELLINGS and MISSPELLINGS
Center is the middle point or the basketball player (typically the tallest on the team) who tends to take jump balls. Centre is a place where specified activity is concentrated. Deal with it.
PUNCTUATION
APOSTROPHE
I think you mean "'90s" not "90's". But I could be wrong. I'm so often wrong.
Let's normalize the writing of contractions and omissions in so much of our common speech. By my assessment, things like "shouldn't've", "never've", "this'll", "that'll" and "w'll" should be everywhere.
When a singular proper noun ends in "s" and you add an apostrophe and an additional "s" to make it possessive you violate at least seven international treaties and norms. If that's your ambition then keep at it.
COMMA
Use the Oxford comma. Just use it.
COLON
A colon should never be italicized. Do not question this.
EM DASH
Can you use too many em dashes? Unlikely. When you do use them, don't forget to put a space before and after. The em dash is not a hyphen and you should never use a hyphen or a pair of them in its place. It's like replacing your truck's tire with a bicycle tire. Don't do it!
EXCLAMATION MARK
All exclamation marks must be italicized (see: above). This is an inviolable law of the universe and precedes the laws of thermodynamics.
The use of multiple exclamation marks should only be used for the purpose of satire or mockery.
PERIOD
No period should be placed within abbreviations, such as Ms, Dr, or Jr. This is done for three reasons:
• To avoid abominations such as this recent offering from The New Yorker: “R.F.K., Jr.,’s” or simpler and more common visual noise like “e.g.,” *barf *
• Because the capitalization and abbreviation are together perfectly overt and sufficient
and
• To save considerable space over larger texts
No periods should be placed after capitalized letters in an acronym. The capitalization is plenty. No one ever fails to comprehend USA, WHO, or WMD.
Only longer bullet points containing more than one sentence should end in a period. For shorter items, as above, any combination of the end of a line, a line break and indentation, and/or a subsequent bullet are sufficiently clear signifiers.
ITALICIZATION
Titles of works and publications should be italicized rather than residing between quotes, where it makes sense to do so. When citing a publication and a work therein, italicize the publication and place quotes around the title.
When emphasis may be missed by a reader, italics should be employed. That said, this whole business of adding emphasis and telling the reader that “[emphasis added]” seems to me like an early warning sign of neurological damage.
I like when the first use of a key term, one not in common usage, or a term from another language is italicized.
I also like to write in italics when what what is being written is intended to be read as me thinking aloud. Italics are used in this way especially where footnotes and endnotes are less than ideal, the word processor doesn't allow for them, or I’ve already used a lot of parenthesis or notes.
CAPITALIZATION
It's "Fall" not "fall" and "Spring" not "spring". Get with the program!
PARENTHESIS
You should try and use lots of brackets in your writing. And the only thing better than singles sets of brackets is square brackets within brackets, tangents within addenda. If you're anything like me, this far better approximates how you think and allows you to be all over the place while attempting to maintain some organization.
CITATION
PLAGIARISM
Plagiarism, whether intentional or otherwise, is the act of presenting someone else’s work as your own; denying creators their due while violating foundational ethical standards and bringing disgrace to yourself and all knowledge-making.
Text is sacred. If you commit one instance of plagiarism as a student, and no one ever sees your work, you will be academically drawn and quartered before being black-listed. If you engage in industrial-scale academic dishonesty for twenty-five years — becoming a highly-cited source of knowledge across many fields or climb the ranks to president of Harvard — your colleagues will shrug and you may or may not receive a slap on the wrist.
Regarding self-plagiarism: no publisher, academic or otherwise, gives a damn about self-plagiarism. If you sell books they will gladly publish your silly and obvious copy-paste reworking of your previous text.
By contrast to text, if an entire academic institution or all of them and most of the scholars therein steal and use other’s images, and do so decade after decade, it does not matter in the least. That’s not even wrist slap-worthy behaviour. Go nuts.
REFERENCES
PP Style suggests digital offerings employ hyperlinks rather than in-text citations (or bibliographical offerings).
Primary sources should be prioritized. Obviously. And texts in the original language should be preferred over translations. (See: my thesis.)
When writing about current events, focus should be on referencing perspectives and ideas outside the current discourse (or moral panic).
Avoid at all costs sneaking punctuation into a quotation. Anything added to a quotation should be placed within square brackets. Let's not be ridiculous.
Block quotations should come after a colon, be intended, and have one single spaced line before and after it.
Analog publications should use footnotes where possible — unless the stupid software you use won’t allow it, in which case you should use endnotes.
Endnotes should not be at the end of a book but come after each chapter of a book or offering in a collection.