User:Ritchie333/MOS for Dummies



The Manual of Style (or MOS to its chums) is a simple idea that has got very complicated. All it really is supposed to do is describe what an article should look like, and it boils down to two simple things:


 * 1) Use common sense
 * 2) Don't be a cockwomble

"Use common sense" - think back to your days at school when you were studying English language. (Or, for those who learned English as a foreign language, whenever you began to learn any formal grammar or structure beyond basic "tourist speak"). Maybe you recall the teacher telling you where commas and full stops go in a sentence, and what combination of words fit well together, and what just doesn't look right. Or perhaps you've just read the BBC News website day-in, day-out, and have a reasonable idea of what Formal English looks like. This is the important part of the MOS, it's all just repeating that stuff you learned at school and probably know anyway.

"Don't be a cockwomble" - this is the tricky part. You may be surprised to learn that parts of the MOS are under Arbitration Committee Discretionary Sanctions. This is where the stuff that isn't common sense can be found. If it's not common sense, people will argue over it, and if they're arguing over it, it does not belong in the MOS. Let those who pedantically argue about the capitalisation of names of birds, what junction list is appropriate for a 140km trail in the Australian outback, where the space in infobox fields belongs or whether or not the text in disambiguation pages should contain links, do their arguing, ignoring it safely to go about your business of writing an encyclopedia.