Re: Debian Publicity Style guide proposal.

Donald Norwood wrote:
> 	I wish to acknowledge and announce to the world that you have been a long time
> and essential contributor in the Publicity team and the overall Project wherever
> it comes to any documentation, guides, style changes, or final pass editing.
> 
> Often you correct and catch small errors that native speakers will overlook from
> speaking words into the dialogue of written word.
> 
> The Publicity and Webwml teams rely heavily on your volunteer effort ... so I
> thought rather than keep praising you in emails and on IRC, I'd like to invite
> you to make a larger impact on the Publicity team and the overall project.
> 
> 	Could I invite you to author the *Official* Publicity/Press team style
> guidelines? This document would help us to keep the same style, grammar, and
> punctuation across the variances of the author's native language(s).

Thanks, this seems like a good idea.  I already have a "personal
debian-l10n-english style-guide page" from the days of the Smith
Project template reviews
	http://jbr.me.uk/linux/esl.html
(and I'd been thinking of giving that an update this year), but this
would need a slightly different type of advice.
 
> We would of course maintain this in its own repository perhaps called: Debian
> Publicity Styling Guide or something to that affect.

This may involve some grumbling about how I don't understand git, but
the reason for that is mostly that I've never done anything that was
made easier by putting it under version control, so maybe this would
be a good opportunity for some practice.
 
> There is an existing Debian style guide somewhere that I cannot find, but I also
> think it may need updating and at this point with our team expanding we really
> need to nail down how we present what we are saying overall.

There's a page of guidelines at
 https://wiki.debian.org/ProjectNews/Guidelines
with a link to the MHRA Style Guide - at least to justify the use of a
standard '%d %b %Y' date format.
 
> In that proposed repository we could also move our 'gotchas' files and other
> publishing tips that often trip up the publishing and presentation processes. We
> would refer to this guide as our 1st step in all future work I.E. Read the style
> guide -> Read the easy mistakes to avoid -> Present -> Edit -> Publish.
> 
> The workflow is somewhat dynamic and will change shortly but principally the way
> we present needs to addressed and be uniform.
> 
> Thoughts (and acceptance :)) ?

I'd be happy to try to help.

(Collaborators may benefit from knowing that in recent years I've
switched from keeping "extreme owl-mode" hours to "extreme
lark-mode"...)

> Also should you elect to become a DD I will be the first to advocate for you,
> your impact on the project is well documented and it would be an honor.

I suffer quite enough Impostor Syndrome just acting as if I'm an
authority on semicolons!
 
> *any typos, phrasing, or superfluous oxford commas are intentional!! :D

Oxford commas are never superfluous.  Well, hardly ever.