Strasse - an un-stylebook

Strasse is a proposed, deliberately-over-simplifying English writers' guide, to overrule, work around, or obstinately ignore conventional stylebook / style-guide editorial rules.

Strasse can be applied to all of your typed English, especially informal messaging, but also published material aimed at Millennials and younger.

General principles

• Everything should be easily typable on a "default" US-English or UK-English QWERTY keyboard and language settings
• Anything that might require specially learning or looking up from conventional style-guides should be blatantly ignored in favour of a deliberately simplified alternative.
• All choices should be made to favour clarity and avoid ambiguity, except where the ambiguity or confusion is merely based on habits of adhering to an older style.
• Grammar checkers should be switched off at all times
• The overall effect should be efficient and democratising. This more than compensates for offences against conventional text aesthetics.

All suggestions or complaints should be made over Twitter or Mastodon

Latest revision: 2020 12

1 - Only the simplest keyboard characters

Only use characters accessible without special keystrokes or unicode.

First, this rules out all accented characters

Secondly, look for commonly accepted ways to work around lack of letters from non-English alphabets:

This especially applies to words pointlessly accented in English:

No special dashes or hyphens or ellipses:

No special quotation marks:

No superscript or subscript:

2. Ignore all small details

Become deliberately blind to small details, even if you end up not being self-consistent!

Stop caring about the difference between US and UK English spelling

3. Use "strassdown"

Use a hacky substitute for formatting where you are not in a rich-text environment:

In strassdown, you don't have to convert-up to any "proper" formatting.

It is also OK draw attention to things with "quotation marks" or Potentially Sarcastic Capitalisation - "Or Both"!

4. Capitalisation

In Strasse you should capitalize names and brands in the way the owners or convention do it, even if it doesn't really matter in the case of brands:

Other than that, in Strasse you should avoid gratuitous capitalisation of words.

You don't need to capitalise common typed abbreviations:

It doesn't matter what you do in titles:

5. Normalise technology vocabulary

Make the language of the modern world part of your normal typed vocabulary:

6. Singular and plural based on your meaning

If you are talking about something as a group of people then it's plural, if you are talking about the single entity then it's singular - simples.

In Strasse this does not need to be in any way consistent and the only incorrect usage is being anal about it.

7. Semicolons

Use semicolons all over the place, as much as you like - in lists; at the end of bullet points; when it's not exactly the end of the sentence; go for it.

8. Misc rules

1. Words like "misc" don't need to be spelled out or have a dot at the end
2. Don't use "&" in a sentence when it's not exactly difficult to type "and"
3. Spanish inquisitions are fine - if you start with "there are two main things" or "here's my two cents", it is perfectly fine to add more points
4. Similarly, if you end up adding principles to an idea, but it started out as one main thing, you can still stick with a singular verb
5. Nevertheless, the Strasse editing principle is that someone else Strasse-compliant should review your work if it's going to be published; in the absence of this, the writer has to sleep on it and give it a second pass
6. It's OK to quote or process something non-Strasse and simplify it - if people are not OK with this then they are non-Strasse
7. In Strasse, there is no correct or incorrect way to give a citation