The Break Down of the Canadian Style Guide
Or
I Bastardate English Before Going to Bed

The Canadian Press, or CP as I will use here (sounds more like PC) is the Style Authority for every journalist and competent media writer in the country. It is heavy, paperback, and written in friendly type are the words “A Guide for Writers & Editors” on the front cover. It sells for around $60 in universities and high-end mega bookstores and is regarded as the Canadian Writers Style Road Map. In its inside pages, the guide keeps a writer up to date with the appropriate use of the English language within the country.

At some point, a group of editors, writers and humanists sat around a cold boardroom table and conferred the proper general writer’s style that would be accepted clearly and unmistakably on a national level.

Horribly however it only shows how not to piss off readers by adopting a more wishy-washy tone to a piece of writing. Canadians acting polite or it is really a brave new world?

Example #1:
CP became the first western news agency to drop the courtesy titles MR, MRS, and MS from all copy. The rule of style is use the full first name (eg: Annalea Kornuta) to identify or introduce a subject first, then resort to the surname for the rest of the writing. This was due to what the CP guide described as an “erratic” system of style to assume consistency within media style.

Example #2:
Descriptive or Identity words, such as cripple, housewife, and Indian, are to be rejected and replaced with “softer” descriptive words such as disabled person, homemaker, and aboriginal. Sadly this attempt backfires in time when due to the media’s constant use of them they become the labels that fall out of flavor. Due to this factor, the style changes slightly from year to year to spin away from the faddish to apply a stark and an almost routine manner of explaining blatant examples of sexism, racism or abuse.

The CP Guide also acts as the 21st century “miss manners” reference by setting down basic rules that each Canadian reporter must abide to when working for any publication within the country.

Example #3:
“The best exercise for impartiality is to stop regularly and ask yourself “am I being as impartial, honest and fair as I can be?” -quote from the guide.

The top sections under “IMPARTIALNESS” go into subjects such as:
Obscenities, Language, Aboriginal Peoples, Age, Disabilities, Race, Names of Races, and Sexism. There are hard rules against stereotyping that trickle down into modest forms of writing (such as: we do not call them firemen anymore). By changing the way the language is written, no one is offended, no one is sued, and everyone goes home happy. This polite attempt is to keep Canadian news stories inoffensive and accepted on a wider general level. By not including anything offensive in your style of writing, the piece takes less of an individual voice further distancing reader and writer and replacing it with a voice more conformed and dictated.

The Guide then gets tired of this forced manner of conservative PC preaching and then starts to tell you what you really need to know for Canadian grammar and punctuation.

The Guide also is too large to stick in your back pocket and refuses to sit flat beside a desk or computer.

The last reason is the most highly used excuse to refuse the CP Style Guide by Canadians everyplace since simple functionality is strongly taught among writers. Irony is really the four-letter word of the Canadian writer.