Tag Archives: guardian

Style guides

In my ill-advised post about off-colour jokes in the staffroom (which bizarrely came up almost the following day as an interview question – the theme in general, not that I had blogged it) I found myself on the thorny issue of capitalisation – Leaning Tower of Pisa or leaning tower?

I had tried the Guardian Style Guide online but not found anything substantive to help me out. Given the Guardian’s love of lower case letters for almost everything (pope, prime minister, parliamentary select committee, french windows, yorkshire pudding) I suspected they would plump for the lower case version of leaning tower of Pisa.

(Just checking their guide for capitalisations, at least three things made me laugh: “The difference between narrowboat and barge is important, particularly if you don’t want to get stuck in a narrow lock somewhere outside Birmingham”, the long section on Caesar, and “call girl: like “vice girl”, an old-fashioned term encountered only in the tabloids, where it is always the 1950s”)

A few days later, joy of joys, I discovered they had a twitter account. And not only that, they take requests and give answers! Despite me not having any standing to ask for help, they happily provide.

Which just leaves the question – is this the sort of issue on which I want to be guided by the Guardian?

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Guardian publishes full list of Euro election results

Kudos to the Guardian which has obtained council-level euro results and munged them together into one giant spreadsheet with click-sort columns, over on its datablog.

The hook the Guardian are using is that it allows you see just how well the BNP did in your area, but anyone with a political hat will want to play with the data and slice it in numerous different ways.

Congratulations, then, to South Lakeland, for the highest Lib Dem Euro score anywhere in the country; commiserations to Barking and Dagenham where we polled under 5%… and ooh – is that a weak correlation between high BNP poll and low Lib Dem score? I think it might be!

EDIT: A grumble in the comments that minor party scores are not there – if you click the link in the first text paragraph there’s a Google Docs spreadsheet with comprehensive information including every party / independent who stood.