Wired Style: Principles of English Usage in the Digital Age is an internet-focused style guide, published in 1996 by Wired magazine and written by Constance Hale (joined by Jessie Scanlon in the second edition). It was created to document rapid shifts in linguistic norms caused by the internet in its early phases. The book gives advice on style and usage, and has separate chapters defining internet neologisms. It most strongly advises to use a clear, direct writing voice similar to speaking style, and to disregard strict rules of writing. Contemporaneous reviews were largely negative, while retrospective reviews were more mixed.

Since the 1990s, the internet has been a place of rapidly-shifting linguistic norms, a host for debate about those norms, and an influence on everyday speech. Amidst this backdrop, Wired magazine was launched in 1993, and quickly became influential in the Silicon Valley scene. By 1996, 73% of Americans polled said they had visited the World Wide Web, up from 21% the year before.^[1] Wired Style was written by journalist Constance Hale to document new language and norms on the internet, not just for journalists, but any kind of writing in the digital age.^[2][3]

Wired Style was first published in 1996, with a second run in 1999^[4] authored by Hale and Jessie Scanlon.^[5] It had a green-and-black aesthetic and a wire binding.^[3] The book warned that the fast-changing norms of the internet would likely leave it with a short shelf life; to counteract that, a website companion was launched, hardwired.com. The website is defunct as of 2021^[update], and little of it has been saved to the Internet Archive.^[1][4]

Wired Style is made up of chapters giving advice on style and usage^[2] – calling its style "Way New Journalism"^[6] – and chapters defining internet neologisms,^[2] the latter of which take up four-fifths of the work in its second edition.^[5] In its style and usage advice, it strongly emphasizes the importance of writing voice, advising writers to be clear, brief, and direct.^[5][6][7] "In short, we celebrate voice. . . . It's the voice of quirky, individualist writers that best captures the quirky individualist spirit of the Net. The voice of people who write the way they talk."^[8] Its style usage otherwise largely resembles existing publications; however, it advises readers to write informally, anarchically, and even inconsistently.^[4][5] Neologisms it defines include jaggies, WTFIGO, pixel, handle, and spam; it leaves out terms like BTW, doxxing, WTF, and username.^[1][4]

Contemporaneous reaction to Wired Style was largely negative. John Frazer Dobson, writing in Computer Shopper, puts the guide "on the other end of the usefulness spectrum".^[9] In response to the exhortation to writers to be brief and informal, Michael Hiltzik writes in the Los Angeles Times: "how does that explain the voice of Wired: self-important, meandering and elitist ... ?".^[6] Bryan A. Garner criticizes the book's loose approach to style in The New York Times:

How do you write a usage guide for the unruly? The answer, judging from this book, is that you don't. Your doctrine becomes linguistic libertarianism, in which the only dogmatic judgments you make are to put down the standard authorities like The Chicago Manual of Style and Strunk and White's "Elements of Style" while proclaiming on the front and back covers, and in press material, that your book has attained a status equal to those classics.^[5]

Charles R. Crawley, writing in Technical Communication, mostly praised the book, offering some of the same criticisms but noting that its emphasis on writing voice changed his own writing.^[8]

Retrospective analyses were more mixed, but agreed that the book's advice was in many ways dated. Commenting on the dot-com bust that occurred shortly after the publication of Wired Style, Alan Pell Crawford wrote in Public Relations Quarterly in 2004: "It's clear that the notion that writing for the Web was radically different from writing for print was as overhyped as the dot-coms themselves". He also echoed many of the above writers' criticisms, saying that its advice on voice was standard for good journalistic writing.^[7] Annie Howard, writing in Slate in 2021, argues that while Wired Style may be "a strange anachronism" in design that holds a different era "in amber", its advice on writing voice was still a positive.^[1] Gretchen McCulloch, writing in The Toast, criticized the book's inconsistent and outdated approach to neologisms; however, she praises its libertarian advice, crediting it as the inspiration for her development of her personal style.^[4]