Your editor is hard at work. I’m juggling three manuscripts, with a fourth soon on the way, and I’m trying to clear my desk before the holidays. If I haven’t been around in the usual places — Twitter, Skype, or wherever you might normally find me — now you know why.
One common thread I’ve found through the fiction and the non-fiction I’ve been working on lately, and even in some of the social forums I dip into, is the proper handling of words relating to our online experience.
Since these are issues I find myself looking up and referencing time and again, I thought that I would share my references in one convenient place.
Chicago Manual of Style informs us that Web site should be two words, and the same goes for Web page, and that while the capital W may become obsolete someday, that day has not yet come. For now, we still recognize Web as a proper noun, short for World Wide Web.
Similarly, capital-I Internet is the preferred usage. However, online has edged out the previously preferred “on-line”, by virtue of its inclusion in the American Heritage (4th ed., 2000) dictionary.
E-mail retains its hyphen for now, and is capitalized when it begins a sentence.
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