On 6/9/06, Death Phoenix
<originaldeathphoenix(a)gmail.com> wrote:
*sigh* People pursuing BE and AE should see what
it's like to be a writer
who has to write a certain way because our style guide says so. Our company
writes in AE, while I personally dislike AE and prefer to write in BE as
much as possible. I write in AE in my company because I'd likely get fired
if I didn't.
I am in that exact same situation - I'm employed to write in AmE,
although AusE (or even BE) is my preference. It's confusing, and
mostly manifests itself with words like "behavio[u]r", and
occasionally "level[l]ed" etc.
I prefer to to write in BE, but when I see people
trying to convert American
articles to BE, such as [[Special Activities Division]], it annoys me
greatly. Same with British articles to AE (such as [[Harry Potter]]). This
also applies to articles that could be written in either AE or BE, but were
first written in one form, and people come to convert it over. I wish I
could apply a category or template to indicate that the article is written
in AE, and please piss off with the BE conversions (and vice versa).
I tend to think conversions are a kind of "noise" that should be
justified by a considerable contirbution. A 20 paragraph article that
becomes a 25 paragraph article accompanied by a conversion from BE to
AE seems like a good deal. A conversion with no other redeeming
features tends to grate, however.
As a user of Canadian English I find it best to have a compromise hybrid
where some words will have an affinity to AmE and others to BrE,
although any single word should be spelled consistently throughout an
article. Insisting on all American or British spelling is really just
another form of POV pushing.
Ec