The style guide is one page
The Register's building notes will be written by forty volunteers, a registrar and a retired architect, mostly on phones on the pavement. Their style guide had to fit on one page pinned to the office wall. Here is all of it, what we left out, and the first note that arrived.
Every style guide I have ever written has been too long. The last one, for a publisher, was forty-two pages. I was proud of it. Six months later I asked the editors which parts they used, and the honest answer was "the bit about em dashes", which was on page thirty-one.
So when the Register asked for a style guide, I made one promise: one page. Printed on one side, pinned to the wall above the card drawers. If a rule didn't fit, it wasn't important enough.
Who writes
The Register's website has two kinds of writing, which Aoife separated in the modelling workshop:
Descriptions: the facts about a building, an architect or a street. Written by Úna, the registrar, and checked by me.
Notes: what this building is like to stand in front of. Written by whoever knows it best, in the first person, signed.
The descriptions are a normal editing job. The notes are not. They are written by about forty volunteers, on phones, on the pavement, often in the rain. Declan, a retired architect, has been writing them in pencil on the backs of index cards for twenty-two years, and they are wonderful. My job was to help the other forty people write like Declan without anyone noticing a style guide had happened.
The page
This is it, as pinned above the drawers.
Write what you would tell someone who stopped beside you. Not an architectural history. What you would say, standing there.
Say something you can see from the street. A door, a window, a mark, a shadow. The reader is standing where you stood.
One to three sentences. If you have more to say, it's probably about the architect, not this building. Tell Úna.
Use "I" and "we". You are a person and so are they.
Names as people say them. The official name goes at the top of the page. In a note, call it what you call it.
Architects by surname. Kavanagh, not Mr. Kavanagh, and never "the architect" if you know who it was.
Numbers as figures. 1964, 3 storeys, 40 years.
No "iconic", "striking" or "brutal". Tell us what it does, and we will decide it is striking.
Seasons and times, not dates. "Best on a winter afternoon" ages better than "on 24 January".
Sign it. Your name goes on every note. If you'd rather it didn't, ask Declan to write it.
That's all of it. Ten rules, about two hundred words, in a large font.
What isn't in it
A lot. There is nothing about commas, hyphens, headings, or tone of voice in the abstract. Those things matter, and I fix them in editing, quietly. Putting them on the page would have made it longer and made the volunteers feel graded.
There is also nothing about how to use the website's editing screens. Aoife's model gave each field help text written in plain words, right under the box, so the instructions are where people are typing rather than pinned to a wall on Fennell Quay.
Declan has already broken rule 2. His note for a church in the suburbs begins with the inside of the bell tower, which nobody can see from the street. I left it in. Rule 2 is for everyone else.
Rule 5, and the editing pass
Rule 5 is the one I argued about. The cards' official names are a glorious mess: some are what the building was called when it opened, some what it is called now, and many are in an old catalogue form, inverted, so you get "Station, Fennell Quay Bus" and "Church of the Holy Name, The". It makes sense in a card index sorted by noun. It makes no sense at the top of a page, or on a plaque.
So in September, before launch, I'll do one editing pass across every building, putting every official name into plain, uninverted form, as you would say it. Mechanical work, mostly. A few hundred names, maybe more. I've blocked out a week.
How it's going
The first notes have started arriving. Here is one from Siobhán, who has led Walk 7 for three years, about a 1950s swimming pool:
On a winter afternoon the low sun comes straight through the long windows and lights the water from the side. The lifeguards say it is the only time anyone stops swimming to look up.
Rules 1, 2, 3, 9 and 10, in two sentences. I didn't change a word.
