Internet, Web, and Other Post-Watergate Concerns

A. I would say that your sense of e-mail being grammatically equivalent to mail is sensible. And the following sentences work well:

Do you have any e-mail?

How much e-mail do you get each month?

How many e-mail messages did he send to you?

E-mail is great.

How many types of direct e-mailings have you considered sending?

The following sentences, if not incorrect, certainly sound less formal:

I got two e-mails today.

Send me some e-mails when you get a chance.

The latest versions of Webster’s and American Heritage, however, endorse the use of e-mail as a noun (e.g., to send an e-mail), the latter dictionary including the plural form e-mails. Perhaps, however, e-mail will one day disappear, and we will say simply mail, or message, or note, or letter, having tired of pointing to the medium with each mention (notwithstanding Marshall McLuhan’s observations).

A. Not usually. But if you’re writing formal correspondence and want some guidance, try The Gregg Reference Manual, a good resource for business usage.

A. We prefer “website.”

A. For hyphenated e-constructions, we agree:

So far, it has proved impossible to send e-mail without some form of electricity.

E-mail is ubiquitous enough that in several years people may simply call it “mail.”

For a proper name, however, we leave things alone: eBay is always eBay, even at the beginning of a sentence.

A. I would guess that the menus in word-processing programs and their need for brevity in order to ensure that an intelligible portion of a phrase can be displayed are probably partly to blame for the ubiquitous phrases “spell checker” and “spell check.” Microsoft Word’s help menu (for version 9/2000), for example, lists the following:

Ways to check spelling

Customize spell checking

Troubleshoot spell checking

Check spelling

But to their credit, once you select either of the middle two, the actual documentation has an expanded title, as follows:

Customize spelling and grammar checking

Troubleshoot spelling and grammar checking

So it appears that someone at Microsoft at least partly agrees with you, expanding “spell” to “spelling” when there’s ample room.

WordPerfect (version 9) lists “Spell Checker” in its Tools menu. But to their credit, in their documentation they seem only to use the phrase when referring specifically to a menu item (and exact nomenclature is important in such settings) or to the title of a small dialog box.

Older versions of WordPerfect, such as WordPerfect 5.1, used “spell” as a verb meaning roughly “to check the spelling in a document.”

Beyond any of those theories of how people have been influenced to say something as ungrammatical as “spell check,” I wouldn’t know where to begin. But if you ask me how to spell check, I can tell you: c-h-e-c-k.

A. We write “dot-com”: dot-com fantasies. We do not write “dot.com”—that would read “dot dot com.” In titles, capitalize the d and the c: “Mogul’s Dot-Com Dreams Leak Like RAM from a Cheap Chip.”

A. We’d never write “Www”; instead, we’d rewrite. And if you’re referring to a website in running text, it’s sometimes okay to drop the “www” and capitalize the rest in a logical manner. For example, you can write about Apple.com or NYTimes.com. For more information and examples, see CMOS 12.444.

A. I’ve been advising people to italicize video games: Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock. They seem to have specific titles and specific versions—almost like titles of movies. Of course there are the older ones like Tempest or Pong or Defender or Ms. Pac-Man, and back then it may have seemed less appropriate to italicize, but I’d do so nonetheless.

A. Sentence-style capitalization is most often the appropriate choice, but make sure that the choice is a logical one. Note that we employ headline-style capitalization for the style categories listed in our frame-based menu on this Q&A site. We do so because each choice in that part of the menu corresponds exactly to the heading for the related document (in fact, these headings, wherever they appear, are generated from a single entry in a database).

A. For commands, icons, keys, etc., an important consideration is to match the capitalization of the software or hardware being invoked. Fortunately such items tend to be capitalized, which helps to set terms off from the run of text without introducing italics or other distinctions:

Choose Save As, under File (or press F12), before you make another move.

You can assign shortcuts to a Ctrl+Alt key combination to launch most Windows applications.

File names may be set in italics or in a different font. An elegant alternative is to relegate them to parentheses:

Open the third chapter (John Doe and the problem of anonymity.wpd) and run the cleanup macro (clean_me).

Words to be typed can be set in bold or in a different font, or both, like this:

Type vacation stop at the prompt, then hit Enter.

Quotation marks, unless they are an explicit element of a command or label, should be avoided—though they may be helpful, used consistently, to delimit file names (which may or may not have telltale extensions and even if they do may be impossible to distinguish from the run of text, as in the WPD example above). Consistency is the key—set up a style sheet tailored to your needs (e.g., a software manual would generally merit greater use of bold and italics to distinguish commands from labels and file names), and stick with it.