AP Stylebook is asking for it
The Associated Press Stylebook, under its Twitter identity @APStylebook, continues to solicit suggestions for the 2011 edition:
We're still eager to hear your suggestions for the 2011 AP Stylebook. Post them here: http://apne.ws/9jtgsw
D’you suppose they’re lonely?
Their site for submitting suggestions doesn’t reveal what suggestions have previously been submitted, so I think you might as well bombard them without worrying whether you are repeating other people’s suggestions. And I mean bombard them with everything you find deficient in the current manual. Surely there’s more on your mind than a passionate belief that Internet should be lowercased.
Because if you don’t smack them around a little, the 2011 edition will be like the 2010 edition: twiddling with inconsequential details. Remember the ACES conference in Philadelphia, when the leak about website was supposed to be a screamer?
In other matters: Baltimoresun.com has opened nominations for the annual Mobbies awards for best local blogs in an array of categories. This is your chance to shower glory on your favorites. A new element this year is a category for Baltimore Sun blogs, the only one for which the Calvert Street wretches are eligible.
That means that [cough] this one [cough] is eligible for nomination.
Comments
Heard about the right-wing conspiracy to make “refudiate” an actual word?
http://twitter.com/Write_Well_
Posted by: Mark | October 21, 2010 7:15 AM
Am I misremembering (I ♥ Al Capp) that a beloved Sun blogger won this a couple of years ago and then wound up on hiatus? Do we really want to go down this road again??
Posted by: Eve | October 21, 2010 9:32 AM
Yes, you are misremembering. I won a Mobbie last summer while on hiatus. This year's awards include Sun employees for the first time.
Posted by: John McIntyre | October 21, 2010 10:48 AM
I already hammered them on the desirability of the Oxford comma.
Posted by: John Cowan | October 23, 2010 11:37 PM
For the sake of those of us outside in the corridor, can you explain why AP style is accorded such prominence by US journalists? Isn't it just the stylebook of a newsagency, to be accepted or corrected by the newspapers that buy the service?
Posted by: Picky | October 25, 2010 11:37 AM
Picky: Three reasons I can think of.
1) The U.S. has well over two thousand daily newspapers, none of which are really national in the way the U.K.'s dozen or so national papers are. (USA Today, is read mostly by people in hotel rooms, and the Wall Street Journal is specialized; the New York Times and the Washington Post are still primarily local papers, though the locality is bigger and you can buy them in most U.S. cities.) Since there just isn't that much local news, they are heavily dependent on wire service copy, particularly AP copy, for much of their content. Using AP style for all copy makes for consistency.
2) Local papers contribute copy back to AP, which is a collective rather than a profit-making business. Most of this doesn't run on national wires, but does run on state-specific wires, so it will show up in other local papers in the same state. AP's more likely to use such copy if it's already in AP style.
3) Americans are an anxious lot who feel great pain if they don't have a style guide to work from, the more restrictive and mechanical the better.
Posted by: John Cowan | October 28, 2010 12:27 PM
Thanks, John. Yes, we have fewer than 150 daily titles, and the provincial ones concentrate mostly on local news. That's their commercial advantage over the nationals, and anyway they don't have the newsprint acreage of their American semi-equivalents.
And I take your second point.
I'm not daft enough to comment on your third point, except to say that there remains a slightly different interpretation of the editing role over here, and matters of style rest less heavily on the souls of British subs (if you can imagine a British sub with a soul).
Posted by: Picky | October 31, 2010 3:48 AM