I’m preoccupied with style.
Over the past year I’ve spent a lot of time making posters, fliers and branded emails; selecting icons that will become shorthand for various projects and communications; tweaking Microsoft Office tools to the best of my ability in order to make text visually appealing; browsing page after page of Creative Commons-licensed Flickr images for the photo that sums up “internet” or “magazine”.
I’ve been seeking the balance between annoying the hell out of people and keeping people informed and feel fairly confident that I’ve more or less found it. Here and there, a flier gets an enthusiastic response. This spring I felt confident enough in how far I’ve come in all of this to talk about process and practices at the 10th Information Literacy Summit.
We’re in the middle of our interim week here in the Library– the short quiet time between the end of Spring and the start of Summer semester. It’s five days of quiet, days for ideas and projects and getting things done. I spent most of yesterday playing around with QR code ideas. I’ve made, revised, edited and re-revised my SOS summer series workshop fliers and have them printed out and sitting on my desk, waiting to be copied until I’m entirely sure I can’t find anything wrong with them.
And now I’m hung up on the orthographic styling of initialisms.
While making changes to the SOS Workshop website, I noticed that one menu item was listed as “S.O.S. Home” another as “SOS Online”. I took out the full stops in the first. Then saw that beneath the SOS logo, the title is written with with full stops. I put the full stops back into the menu item. Then I looked at my fliers: “C.O.D. Library SOS Workshops”.
I can’t very well present “C.O.D. Library S.O.S. Workshops”. It’s a nuisance to type, for one, and it pretty much offends my sense of style, for whatever that’s worth. Too many full stops.
Personally, I type “COD” and “SOS” in my own writing. I’m fairly sure the “C.O.D.” on the fliers is a holdover from older designs. I can’t see myself typing it and am a little surprised it hasn’t caught my eye before. Can I change it? Can I present “COD Library SOS Workshops”?
According to the College’s style sheet, College of DuPage is initialized as C.O.D.– with full stops
between the letters. Yet, on the College’s own website, I see a number of stylized examples where the initialization is full stop free. I’m not the only one who thinks “COD” looks better than “C.O.D.”
Without those full stops, though, the initialism can become an acronym. It’s now “Cod Library” and “Connect with Cod”. SOS, on the other hand appears as an initialism with or without those full stops– it’s never “Sos Workshops”. It matters, too, I would argue, that in the case of the workshop series, “SOS” doesn’t actually stand for anything any more. Where it was once an abbreviation of “Smart Online Searcher”, we’ve expanded our scope beyond that title and now, confusing or no, “SOS” is just “SOS”.
So what to do? I have a feeling, I’m the only one who cares about this kind of thing, and I’m just stalling, avoiding printing my damn fliers out of a nagging fear that I’ve made a mistake with a date or a time or a description. On the other hand, I’m not going to be happy until my intitialisms are consistent– full stops or not.
