Style guide for questions, answers, and comments

Question

Style guides such as those on Wikipedia, Stack Overflow, Ask Ubuntu have been greatly helpful for me (and many in those communities) in creating well-written, well-formatted, easy-to-understand, easier-on-the-eye content. So, I would like to propose a style guide for this site.

Yes, I understand that style is more of a personal preference — this is perfectly all right for well written content.

This guide is meant to avoid poorly written, badly formatted, hard-to-understand, hideous looking content; we can all spot one, can't we? And to deal with one when we spot them.

This will be a good one-stop reference for everyone who is interested.

Note

This is a community wiki, so go ahead and edit this question and the answer(s) to best suit the purpose.

Answer 1

I was just about to ask this question. Instead I will post an answer. :P

There seem to be a handful of styling targets on EL&U. These are the ones I could think of quickly:

• Should question titles be questions?
• Should we use single or double quotes around words in question titles?
• Should we use single or double quotes or italics or code markers around words in question bodies? (Discussion 1. Discussion 2.)
• Should we use single or double quotes or italics or code markers around words in comments?
• Should we use > or backtick for example sentences? (Discussion 1. Discussion 2.)
• Should we include punctuation in question titles?
• Should we mark explicitly incorrect examples? (See discussion.)
• Should we have a guideline regarding properly formatted links?
• Should Word1 Vs Word2 be the standard format for such questions? (See discussion.)

I provided relevant links where I knew about them. Please edit in more if you find them.

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Another relevant question is whether people should edit with the intent of:

• Changing the style of the entire post
• Change the style of a post so it is consistent with itself
• Change the style of a post so it is consistent with the question

Answer 2

This is the way I handle some of these, from another answer.

In this medium, where writing and typography has to express speech and sounds,
I use italics and boldface like this:

• I use plain italics only for citing examples and titles. Never for emphasis.
• I use boldface for emphasis. These are words that would be LOUD in my speech.
• I use bold italics for technical terms, usually with capitals, and links if I have them.
• I also use bold italics in examples to point out individual parts that get mentioned in the text.

In addition, I use single quotes only for glosses, and double quotes for actual quotations.

• Lushootseed /gʷidəq/ 'geoduck'
• "A man does not know what he is saying until he knows what he is not saying." -- Chesterton

I also use bullets for examples, which I use a lot of; examples are much more useful than descriptions when discussing grammar, since nobody ever uses grammatical terms the same way.