Why do publications such as National Geographic have an editorial style, strive for consistency, and even produce manuals to explain that style?

On occasion, writers have challenged my endorsement of editorial consistency by quoting Ralph Waldo Emerson: "Consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds." Actually, according to Stevenson’s Home Book of Quotations, the quotation says "foolish consistency." What does that mean? Is it foolish today to expect a publication to maintain a certain consistency in spelling, in punctuation, in capitalization?

Rules and regulations are necessary in any civilized undertaking, and making a publication conform to certain uniform standards produces clear writing, which, in turn, leads to easy comprehension by the reader. Even if the reader has no intricate knowledge of the rules and reasons for writing something a certain way, he’s helped by someone else’s knowledge and care with words.

So, we copyeditors do our job primarily to help the reader. I suspect, though, that deep down it’s also because we, more than many people, like order and precision, and find great satisfaction in the subtlest of corrections. Our love of poring over manuscripts—putting in commas, taking out commas, debating hyphens, frowning on the misuse of “decimate” and “compromise”—might even stem in part from our wanting to show how knowledgeable we are about grammar, spelling, punctuation. (This could well be akin to the gotcha tone I detect in some of the letters readers write when they spot what they believe is a grammatical error.)

The National Geographic Style Manual has existed since the early 1960s, when it was a typewritten guide (with several carbon copies) for a handful of editors. Within a few years it became a typeset edition—loose-leaf pages in a yellow binder. Soon there was a style committee of magazine staff who met regularly to update the manual and revisions were published every few years. The style committee now comprises editors from all areas of the Society—television, books, other magazines, new media, marketing, school publishing—and the manual is no longer printed but is found online where it can be constantly updated.

Several years ago we made the manual available, on our website, to the public. You can find it at the bottom right corner of National Geographic magazine’s home page or by using this URL in your browser: stylemanual.ngs.org. In the manual you’ll find the editorial style rules used in most National Geographic publications.

Speaking about rules, we should have a few for this blog, not that I can imagine grammarians ever becoming rude or obnoxious. It’s all right to be passionate, but always be polite; keep your language clean; focus (this is a column about grammar and word usage); don’t plagiarize; don’t get personal or nasty. I will respond to some, but certainly not all, comments. Thanks for the comments so far. Keep them coming!

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