“Why is a raven like a writing desk?”

Question

The above is a famous riddle from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll, [ref1], [ref2], [ref3], [ref4-∞], …

But seriously,

How is writing unlike writing-style?

I recently reviewed this suggested edit, which added the writing tag to this question, which already had the writing-style tag.  And I scratched my head and looked them up:

writing-style     18 followers, 732 questions
Questions related to the use of proper writing style in English

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The style of a sentence, phrase, or construction, is its general expression of meaning as a whole, apart from the actual categorical meaning of the constituent words.

Use this tag for questions asking about the style of a particular sentence, phrase, or construction.

Sounds good.

writing      22 followers, 387 questions
This tag is for questions specifically related to written English.

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Examples of questions using this tag

• If an insertion in parentheses ends with a smiley, how do I distinguish between the two?
• Should you always use the accent in foreign words like “résumé”?

(Cont’d) …                  _{[Order changed for effect.]}

Ah, I thought, writing-style refers to the thoughtful authoring, composing, preparing and rendering of ideas, information, knowledge, etc., into prose words (or, perhaps, verse) intended for non-vocal delivery and/or presentation, while writing refers to the physical/visual representation of text.  But the list goes on:

… (Cont’d)

• Capitalisation of nouns in English in the 17th and 18th centuries
• Why, in old books, are dates often given with the years redacted?
• Which variant of English should I use when my target audience is the world?

and so I wondered, why isn’t capitalization the most appropriate tag for a question about capitalization?  Why isn’t date the most appropriate tag for a question about dates?  And why aren’t writing-style and/or dialects the most appropriate tags for a question about which variant of English to use?

And finally, if we need tag(s) for the physical/visual representation of text, what’s wrong with typography (8 followers, 132 questions), orthography (26 followers, 1.1k questions) and symbols (4 followers, 97 questions)?

A quick scan of recent questions tagged [writing] reveals questions about

• document (e.g., bibliography) formatting (which should probably be covered by style-manuals, although that has no tag wiki / usage guidance yet),
• formality (e.g., use of pronouns in papers for publication)  (which should probably be covered by formality and/or style-manuals),
• politeness (e.g., salutations in letters and emails) (politeness),
• indentation (typography),
• word choice (an issue for spoken English as well as written, covered by word-choice),
• use of “a” vs. “an” before symbols (which is an issue for spoken English as well as written, and probably covered by symbols),
• punctuation (which is also a tag: 44 followers, 1.9k questions),

etc.  It’s a tag about everything, so it’s a tag about nothing.  (By the way, of the 387 questions tagged [writing], 52 are also tagged [writing-style].

So, should the writing tag be deleted?  Or should it be defined to something useful?  (I guess questions currently bearing that tag would need to be revisited/re-evaluated either way.)

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Related: Should the typography tag and typesetting tag be merged?

Answer 1

"Writing" should definitely disappear. For the rare question for which it would be appropriate, for questions on written registers of English and their differences from spoken English, "written-english" would be a much clearer tag. Or maybe it could be renamed, I just don't know how many questions would then be mistagged.

"Orthography" is a separate topic. I'd suggest that it be used for discuss how the Latin script has come to be used to transcribe spoken English. This topic has a lot of history and quirks and many very interesting questions.

I've suggested this for the wiki for writing-style because the current wiki doesn't really make sense. But the edit was knocked back. Anyone want to make some improvements to it and then we can try again?

Writing style is hard to define definitively - but when you see good style, you know it. Good style is elegant rather than clumsy, powerful rather than weak. It takes practice to develop.

Use this tag for questions asking about the style of a particular sentence, phrase, or construction. But be warned, many of these questions are what we call Primarily Opinion Based, and are likely to be closed.