New Yorkers Update Style Guide for the Internet Age

This week, the top copy editors of The New Yorker announced that the magazine has completed a house-style “readvisor.”

Several things had changed. But the dedication to the situation – these two small dots floating above a particular vowel were loved by the New Yorker editors, and there was almost no one else – not.

“For everyone who hates Dieresis and feels it's valuable, overstated and ridiculous, there's another person who finds it attractive,” Andrew Boynton, head of the magazine's copying department, said in a phone interview Wednesday.

Over 100 Day-Invisible Magazines are famous for their obsession with heterodox spelling and punctuation rules. So Boynton's decision to announce the changes to the style guide in New Yorker's Daily Newsletter on Monday was notable. The revolution arrived in two squat paragraphs containing two Dierrez, three EM dashes and four sets of parentheses.

The magazine abandons in favour of “Websites”, “Internet”, “Internet”, “Websites”, “Inboxes”, and “Internet”. “Mobile phones” are not just two, but not just one word.

“Welcome to 1995, you may be thinking,” Boynton writes in the announcement, offering another example of a new rule. The idea becomes italic to distinguish it from other texts.

The house-style keeper of magazines is deliberately slow to make concessions in the internet age. “We don't want to make changes and then turn it back,” he said. “We want to make sure it's a lasting change that's where people are used to and comfortable.”

The proposal by the magazine's longtime editor, David Remnick, crowdsourged potential changes from current and previous groups of editors and copy editors in January. Boynton and his colleagues came up with a list of proposals in February.

He was smearing his lips tightly about which one was rejected. “I don't want them to be subject to fetishization in the outside world,” he said.

The rules of New Yorker style trigger strong responses in the territories of grammar, primarily in the civic realm. In opinion, on social media, critics have long criticized magazines for the use of snobberly, resolute, and obscure commas.

They have problems with double consonants in “traveler” and “focused.” They are obsessed with the “re-meeting” that thrives. Boynton once felt that the magazine needed to implement defenses in ways that would disrupt the possessive form of “Donald Trump Jr..” (Three punctuation marks are required in a row.)

Benjamin Dreyer, retired copy chief of Random House and author of “Draeyer's English,” has his oddities in the magazine's house style. (For one, he called Donald Trump Jr.'s punctuation rules “surprisingly scary.”) But he praised the latest update on Wednesday's call.

“I've been kidding for years, that you shouldn't necessarily have a house style that you see from space,” he said. “But that's the purpose of New Yorkers. They want to be New Yorkers.”

He said he was relieved that the magazine did not abolish Dieres. He was pleased that the editor stood in the outlier structure of “teenagers” and “percent.” However, other updates have been delayed for a long time.

“In the end, the 'website' will shrink to lowercase. One word – I think we did it in a random house, I don't know, 20 years ago? ” he said.

So far, magazine authors and editors seemed happy with the change, Boynton said. Plus, he knows they break rules that they can't stand.

Sometimes he forgives them. “That's something that a lot of people don't understand about New Yorkers,” he said. “We're always making exceptions to as many rules as we have.”