Wednesday, April 2, 2008

Editorial Tip of the Week: Church Style Guide

To repent for the tardiness of our Editorial Tip of the Week, we want to give you a tip that will change your life (and ours): the official Style Guide for Publications of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-days Saints.

Yes, there is a right and wrong way to capitalize Church terms—and now, you can do it the right way! For only $3.50, you can own this amazing, life-changing publication by clicking on the link below:

http://www.ldscatalog.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/ProductDisplay?catalogId=10151&storeId=10151&productId=40747&langId=-1&sortId=3&sortOr=1&sTerm=31107&sNVPs=%26beginIndex%3D0%26pageSize%3D200%26searchTerm%3D31107%26searchType%3DALL%26sType%3DSimple%26pageId%3D1%26pageCt%3D15&retURLtext=Back%20to%20'31107'%20Search&retURL=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ldscatalog.com%2Fwebapp%2Fwcs%2Fstores%2Fservlet%2FCatalogSearchResultView%3FcatalogId%3D10151%26amp%3BstoreId%3D10151%26amp%3BlangId%3D-1%26beginIndex%3D0%26pageSize%3D200%26searchTerm%3D31107%26searchType%3DALL%26sType%3DSimple%26pageId%3D1%26pageCt%3D15%26sortId%3D3%26sortOr%3D1

*Please be aware, Cedar Fort’s style does differ on some points from the Church’s style guide. Namely, we discourage the capitalization of deity pronouns.

4 comments:

Tamster said...

Sorry, but why would you discourage that? Just curious! :-)

The Editors said...

Not because we want to be sacrilegious, by any means. It's simply that we've never seen a manuscript where it was done consistently, and it's very difficult to catch them all. No matter how many editors go over it, we keep finding more. It's just so natural to make pronouns lower case that it's difficult both for the author and editor to make them consistently upper case. In most manuscripts, we've seen it done inconsistently even within the same sentence. So the short answer is: it just makes life easier for everyone.

Tamster said...

Okay, that makes sense. So hypothetically speaking, say an author actually does do it consistently. Would you make them change them all back? :-)

Alison Palmer said...

Ha! I've always done capitals- and CFI hasn't called me on it yet. :) I feel all powerful and sneaky now! Oh, wait now you guys know and you're going to give me a bad time about it in a few months, huh? Dang!
I'd noticed that most publisher's material had gone to lower case, but it always felt wrong to me. Sort of itchy...