A style guide for third-party 4e/GSL publishers
I read a lot of third-party material for D&D 4e, and I frequently find myself annoyed by the sloppiness with which some small presses attend to the de facto standards (that is, to WotC’s own stylistic practices) in presenting different types of 4e content. I used to alternate between surprise and annoyance, but nowadays the surprise comes from reading a 4e supplement that doesn’t average three or four errors of style, grammar, punctuation, spelling, and so on—per page.
Not only do such errors just grate on my own sensibilities, given that I speak and write for a living, but they also create a barrier between readers and otherwise excellent content. Not all third-party supplements can claim excellence, of course, but many do have great content “hiding” behind flabby writing and careless editing.
To contribute to better third-party supplements, I have begun to compile a style guide for 4e/GSL supplements, reverse-engineered from WotC products and focused on stylistic bits that many third-party products get wrong. Publishers who follow these guidelines—and who subject their products to proofreading by a rigorous copy editor with a good command of standard written English—will lower the linguistic barriers between their readers and their content.
I have placed the guide on a separate page in hopes that it may remain a timely and useful resource for all would-be writers of 4e/GSL material. Please use the comments on that page (rather than this post) to suggest additions and/or corrections.
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