The Elements of the Stylebook

There’s style, and then there’s Style.

“Style, with a capital S, achieves what a rule book never can: it lights the page, draws readers, earns their delight, makes them gasp or weep and sometimes captures a place in memory,” begins the online foreword to The New York Times Manual of Style and Usage, the paper’s reference guide, established in 1895, which encourages consistent and polished language throughout the news report. “Writerly style (even without the illicit capital S) is a set of tools and tricks, a tone of voice.”

The Associated Press has long been the gold standard for uniformity among most international news publications. But for over a century, The Times’s stylebook has set a parallel course when it comes to journalistic style. The stylebook largely consists of rules dictating renderings, syntax and abbreviations — Gov. vs. Governor, capitalization of words for headlines and the devilish Oxford comma, for example. But as a living document that constantly grapples with the ethics of language, it also absorbs the larger cultural lexicon.

The stylebook codifies a set of practices designed to make the paper easy to read.

“In a news organization where you have hundreds of writers and editors working very quickly on deadline, you want the reader to get the sense that there’s some consistency,” said Philip B. Corbett, the associate managing editor for standards, who oversees the use of style and editing standards across the newsroom.

Despite what some readers may wish, “We are definitely not looking to be on the cutting edge — rather the reverse,” Mr. Corbett said. “Ideally we want to use style that is already settled and accepted and familiar in usage.”

The stylebook has been formally updated multiple times in its tenure, most recently published in hard copy in 2015. Reporters and editors have access to an online version that is revised throughout the year.

Conversations about style in the newsroom can involve something as simple as the decapitalization of “dumpster” (thanks to the loss of a trademark), or as complex as a word like Brexit. The term referring to Britain’s move to leave the European Union was originally a tabloid neologism.

“It isn’t a word we would immediately adopt as if it were a word that existed forever,” Mr. Corbett said. “Typically we treat it as a slang or jargon or colloquialism,” rendered with quotation marks. “But then over time, a word like that becomes so widespread, it’s a word everyone uses all the time to describe this phenomenon, that at some point we loosen up.”

An ideologically charged term would be a different story, said Susan Wessling, senior editor for editing standards.

“If Brexit had been the term adopted by one specific side of that situation, we would have had a different conversation about how to use Brexit,” she said. (There is currently no entry for the term, though she and Mr. Corbett said they would consider whether to include one.)

The process of adding or amending entries is a little ad hoc, Mr. Corbett said. Typically, internal discussions among editors over a term or phrase spark discussion, and Mr. Corbett and Ms. Wessling take it under advisement.

The guide is closely followed, but there’s room for editorial discretion.

“We’ve always had exceptions to everything people have always considered a rule,” Ms. Wessling said. “It seems more and more there’s a wider feeling that more things should be considered exceptions.”

When it comes to sensitive topics like diversity, sexuality and immigration, as many as a dozen editors from across the newsroom might be consulted. It can take months to settle on updated language.

Mr. Corbett recently offered guidance for the term Dreamers, for example, a reference to young people brought to the United States as immigrant children. “Because it’s widespread, it is acceptable to use, but we should avoid using it as the default term because it has a tone to it,” he explained.

The challenge is to keep a rule in place while allowing for these exceptions, he said.

“It’s probably good to have the stylebook in place as a braking mechanism to changes,” Mr. Corbett said. “And yet there is a risk: If we follow the stylebook and throw exceptions out the window, we risk being stodgy or old-fashioned and being out of key with the tone of the piece.”

(In writing this article, your reporter has used the stylebook half a dozen times.)