Styleguide

This styleguide mostly applies to posts published in the last couple of years (after 2022 or so). Earlier posts on this blog may or may not follow these personal rules.

This document is being updated on a regular basis.

Choices of style

Artificial intelligence

I use periods to write A.I., that way I avoid having “Al” on screen, which, depending on the font used and the sentence, can be a little confusing. Yes, I didn’t write A.I. before, it was just “Al,” with an L, like in Al Green.

British or US English

A few years ago, I switched to British English. It’s how I learned it at school after all, and I felt like it’s the least I can do to thank my middle school and high school teachers. I don’t care too much about it though, so my apologies for the hybridness of it all, especially when it comes to older posts, or quotation marks.

OS names

I write “iOS” but I dont write “macOS” — I keep writing “MacOS” or WatchOS, &c.

Companies

This is the trickiest one of them all. Single or plural? I know there is a difference between US English and UK English, but my instinct, being French, is to use the plural when talking about companies. Again, this may vary a lot between posts, but trust me, I try to be consistant.

Typography

Accents

I use accent everywhere I can, even in English words that come from French like cliché, café, or touché, that seemingly don’t always require the accent.

Et cætera

A few years ago, I discovered that a possible (if ancient) abreviation for et cætera was using the ampersand instead of “et”, resulting in a beautiful “&c.” Because it looks so cool, almost like a logo, I try to use it everywhere I can. It was also part of the former identity of this website, before it was named The Jolly Teapot.

Title casing

I tend to avoid using English title casing on digital media: for a book cover I have no issues with it, but on top of the text, I find it busy and clunky. I prefer using sentence casing for titles (closer to what we do in French), which I find more elegant and easier to read.

Dashes

My previous publishing platform of choice, Blot, has taught me a lot about typography: this is how I learned about optical alignment and about the proper way dashes should look like in terms of spacing, so this is what I’m using now, as much as I can. Even have a BBedit script for it that replaces the double hyphens with an en-dash with the correct spacing.

Inline quotes

I try to use italics for inline quotes. It feels a bit redundant to use both quotation marks and italics, but I prefer it. Not sure what would be the correct quotation marks to use (single or double), but just be glad that I don’t use French quotation marks.

Blockquotes

Blockquotes are currently not styled in italics, even if I wouldn’t mind this redundancy; it has more to do about keeping things simple CSS-wise. Right now my blockquotes use a reduced-point size, and slightly tighter line height (as recommended by Matthew Butterick), and I leave the browser default margins.

I try to not end a post with a blockquote, it looks weird.

Periods

I am a free spirit when it comes to final punctuation in list items, and sentences that and with a parenthesis or quotation mark. Inside, outside, let’s say it will depend on my mood.

I also don’t use periods in titles, because I’m not a monster. One of two may have found their way in some article titles, and for that I apologise.

Updated 5 Oct 2025・Why I created a styleguide