Rating: Summary: Are the WIRED staff as pompous as this book implies? Review: "SIGGRAPH" is "Siggraph" because the folks at WIRED find theoffical ACM acronym too something. ditto "Wais" and "Arpanet". The section titles are effectively useless. Do I look up "VDT" under "Transcend the Technical" or "Anticipate the Future"? I'm glad my company paid for this book, otherwise I'd want a refund. I just hope we don't adopt it as a style manual. Wired Style is perfect for people who don't know how to write about computers and the Internet and don't care if they know how to write about computers and the Internet. Get a good glossary of computer terms and a decent style manual (AP, UPI, whatever) and you'll be much happier.
Rating: Summary: Are the WIRED staff as pompous as this book implies? Review: "SIGGRAPH" is "Siggraph" because the folks at WIRED find the
offical ACM acronym too something. ditto "Wais" and "Arpanet".
The section titles are effectively useless. Do I look up
"VDT" under "Transcend the Technical" or "Anticipate the Future"?
I'm glad my company paid for this book, otherwise I'd want
a refund. I just hope we don't adopt it as a style manual.
Wired Style is perfect for people who don't know how to
write about computers and the Internet and don't care if
they know how to write about computers and the Internet.
Get a good glossary of computer terms and a decent style
manual (AP, UPI, whatever) and you'll be much happier.
Rating: Summary: No wonder they couldn't float an IPO Review: A rehash of the obvious. Thoroughly pedantic. Does Wired think it knows something about about the subject. $18 dollars burned. After attempting to swindle ignorant invesotrs with a failed public stock offering, Wired has turned to petty larceny
Rating: Summary: Don't waste your time, let alone your money. Review: Anyone who thinks this book is a "style manual" has clearly never used one. A more accurate description would be a glossary, you know, the kind which appears in the back of old textbooks and defines things you already knew. Some of the acronyms which have found their way into this book would be interesting if you were doing a term paper on obsolete technical terms. Big disappointment all around
Rating: Summary: Not a very useful stylebook Review: As a copy editor, I have to try to find a consistent spelling for terms that appear regularly, some of which are not yet in the dictionary. In 1998 I bought the 1996 hardcover version of this book, thinking it would fill in the gaps dictionaries and other stylebooks have left regarding how to consistently spell "website," "webpage," "email," "e-commerce," "Internet," "intranet," etc. It was the only book I saw on the subject back then. The capitalization of "Internet" makes some sense, but capitalizing "Web site" and making it two words does not really, especially since in the 1999 revised soft cover version they add the possibilities of lowercased, unhyphenated single words like "webzine" and "webmaster" (not Webmaster, etc.). The insistence on not hyphenating "email" but hyphenating "e-commerce" ends up making an article I edited look ridiculously inconsistent. I had "Web site," "intranet," "Internet," "email," "e-commerce" and other terms all appearing in the same story. And let's face it, everyone spells it "website" in email (e-mail?) except the authors of this stylebook. I find it useless and hope to find a better stylebook for internet and other techno-specific terms that considers the needs of copy editors. Thank goodness for the book's index re: finding what I was looking for though!
Rating: Summary: Great reference manual Review: As an editor of an online publication, I find myself picking up Wired Style again and again. It has great definitions for terms that frequently come up. Want to know what open source is? Or asynchronous transfer mode? There's also cute stuff in there, like who coined the word nerd (Dr. Seuss). I'm not sure I would pick this book up just to read, but if you're in a position where you need to look up terms quickly, this is the best out there in the high-tech arena.
Rating: Summary: A Must for Cyber Writter Review: For the ignorant of cyber culture this book will introduce a basic concept of smart and honest writting procedure in the Literature of the Digital Era.
For the Wired magazine readers, it increase our sentimental-loving feeling of cyber culture. For the geeks, be proud of yourselves, geeks ruled. For writter of the 21st century, this book is a-must.
The best thing about this book, there is always an update on the expansion of WiredStyle writting (the book called it WiredStyle 2.0), which is located in http://www.wiredstyle.com
Rating: Summary: Oh. My. GAWD. Review: Having read through the first edition, I looked forward to the next, which was supposed to be organized like a real style guide (read: The AP Stylebook and Libel Manual) and less like an in-your-face, smarmy declaration of war against English. At least the editors of Wired accomplished that much, renaming some key writing principles like "Screw the Rules" with "Be Irreverent." But you really have to wonder about a style guide which quotes Entertainment Weekly -- that's right, Entertainment Weekly, that standard bearer of educational enlightenment -- not once, but TWICE on its back cover. This means that the publishers had a hard time coming up with complementary quotes to fill in the space. I work as a copywriter for a book publisher, and to quote the same publication twice on the same cover is simply bad, bad form -- only the most desperate of publishers do so. Little wonder why EW reviewed this book -- after all, Wired Style is SO funny, like the little jab it takes at hackers when defining "Trojan Horse": "The work of dark-side hackers. A seemingly innocuous program that hides a malicious virus.... the word is proof that hackers read the classics." Ha. Ha. Isn't that smart? Because we all thought hackers hadn't read the classics, and wouldn't know what a Trojan Horse is. You'd never find this kind of "humor," this smartalecky take on English usage, in the New York Times Manual of Style and Usage. It IS useful to have an guide to help explain such terms as "Trojan Horse," "Watermark," and "dpi" in context of the Web and computers (thus the two stars), but Wired Style has a long way to go before it can compare to the authoritative works such as the NYT and AP guides -- which do not, despite Wired Style's continued claim in both editions of their guide, force writers to call Bill Gates "William H. Gates III, chairman of Microsoft Corporation." (This claim is based on a general rule for identifying people who are not immediately recognizable to the general public -- Bill Gates doesn't qualify. The editors at Wired really should know better.)
Rating: Summary: "Principles of English Usage"? I think not.... Review: I bought this book from Amazon.com on the advice of a good friend who writes technical support manuals for a software company; I figured it was a sure bet. I wish now that I had read the reviews before I clicked "Add this to your shopping cart." What a *perfect* example of style over substance -- and a style attempting to imitate that of _The Chicago Manual of Style_, at that (nice touch with the orange cover, kids...). This is really nothing more than a glorified glossary of terms with kicky packaging and hard-to-read pages. It's a magazine article about Internet/Web jargon on both steroids *and* acid. I expected much more in terms of content and guidance and I was sorely disappointed. I hope Amazon.com's return policy is as straightforward as it seems.
Rating: Summary: One Word Summary of the Book: Useless Review: I got an offer to buy the book from one of the 'book of the
month' clubs that I'm a member of. A book titled 'Manual
of Style' coming from Wired raised my antennas.
So I first checked it at the library. I'm glad I did.
It is a perfectly useless book. There Wired: See I used
the word 'perfectly' in the review of your book.
I think they should be tried for swindling people with
this trash. It has no content, only packaging and the gibberish from the foul mouth of a bunch of adolescent kids.
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