by Sarah Craighead Dedmon

My normally easy relationship with the English language went through a low point when sentence diagramming dominated the eighth-grade curriculum. I can only assume a mathematician developed the macabre practice, perhaps looking for ways to make language more math-like and, therefore, worse. There may be a variety of opinions on the matter today, but a quick Google search found an Atlantic magazine article titled “The Wrong Way to Teach Grammar” and I agree, so I’ll leave it there.

But, besides through prolific reading, is there ever a good way to learn grammar? As may be evident to better-trained eyes, the whys and wherefores of certain clauses or phrases and sometimes even commas do not capture my imagination. But there is one area of grammatical mechanics that I enjoy, and that’s the creation of this newspaper’s stylebook.

It’s not yet available for sale on Amazon, but the Machias Valley News Observer Stylebook is as real as the paper this column is printed on, and as widely adopted, too. Like so many of our peers, such as the New York Times, or Wall Street Journal, I felt it was appropriate that we set our own guide to grammatical usage. I started with the Associated Press Stylebook, used by most newspapers in the United States, and then improved it.

I’ve left the basic AP structure in place—headlines aren’t capitalized, no numerals below 10, ditto ordinal numbers (see exception below), and as evidenced in the first line of this paragraph, we follow AP’s em dash guidelines — no spaces if preceding a list, as above, spaces if for emphasis. Of all the arbitrary grammar rules, spaces around an em dash make the least sense to me. Shouldn’t a newspaper’s style guide have been designed to conserve space and effort, especially on behalf of the poor typesetter’s fingers? Even so, I keep the rule because idiosyncrasy is a vital, character-building attribute of all style guides, and the Machias Valley News Observer Stylebook can be no exception.

Now to the improvements. In the MVNO Stylebook, we adhere to the AP rule of no ordinal numbers in dates (i.e. Jan. 10th, Sept. 18th) except in the case of anything written by Ronie Strout, because she likes to use them and we like Ronie. The MVNO Stylebook endeavors to address, after all, the people and places it serves, which brings us to the word Downeast. Except in the case of proper nouns, Downeast always appears as one word. But, please don’t feel judged. If you’ve named your business Down East Acme Padlocks, we can still be friends, because that’s a proper noun, and because the MVNO Stylebook is nothing if not magnanimous. 

Where phone numbers are used in our writing, we never include the area code, a nod to Maine’s position on a shrinking list of states (12) that still have only one. How long can that last? We should enjoy it while we have it, I say! Where Washington County is too long to fit in a headline, we never abbreviate to WaCo, always to Wash. Co., primarily owing to repeated scoldings from a local businessman, whom I willingly defer to in matters of Downeast parlance. 

A stylebook is a living document, after all. 

Crafting our stylebook is one of the things that makes this job so enjoyable. I assume Strunk and White had to agree when writing Elements of Style, but the authors of the MVNO Stylebook are only me, myself, and I, and we all get along famously.  

Yet, we are willing collaborators. Have a suggestion for edits to the MVNO Stylebook? We’re always looking to improve. Please drop your notes on usage to [email protected].