Old School « We Write For You

One space, not two spaces, after a period. Period.

October 22, 2009 | Posted in: General Writing, Old School | Tags: AP, AP Stylebook, colons, copywriting, editing, editing tips, grammar, periods, spaces, spacing, We Write For You, wewriteforyou.com, writing, writing tips |

A sign showing an exclamation point. For many years, writers were taught to include two spaces after periods and certain other punctuation marks, such as colons. There was good reason for this at the time: Typewriters produced a typeface that made it aesthetically unpleasant to have only one space separating sentences.

However, those days are long gone. The fonts computers produce have made the two-space method unnecessary. Today, every major style manual (including the Chicago Manual of Style and the AP Stylebook) makes it clear that one space is proper.

Does it matter if you still use two? Actually, yes. Anytime we see two spaces in an article that was written in recent years, we immediately think “amateur hour.” And that’s the last thing you want your reader to think about you.

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Now, that’s an embarrassing typo: AP Stylebook edition

August 7, 2009 | Posted in: General Writing, Old School | Tags: AP, AP style, AP Stylebook, AP Stylebook 2009, business writing, editing, editing tips, FAQ, Frequently Asked Questions, grammar, proofreading, style guides, We Write For You, wewriteforyou.com, writing, writing tips |

If you’re ever uncertain about how to spell a word, it’s always worth the time to look it up. As we mentioned in this earlier post, it takes only seconds to look up a word on an online dictionary.

By the same token, if you write quite a bit, it’s definitely worth the $15 to get online access to the AP Stylebook, the best go-to guide for proper usage. It’s a phenomenal resource you can check out here.

However, a visit to the site’s Frequently Asked Questions page reminds you that anyone can make a mistake. The FAQ’s second item reads:

Is the 2008 Associated Press Stylebook available? No, it has sold out and is not going to be reprint. The ISBN number is 978-0-917360-52-7

The obvious goof here is that “reprint” should be “reprinted.” But if we’re going to be picky (and you just know we are), the answer also is missing a period at the end.

And that’s not simply a “style” consideration, ironic as that would be. All of the other answers in the FAQ (including another that ends in a series of numbers) end with a period.

Again, we strongly recommend a subscription to the AP Stylebook to anyone who writes professionally on a regular basis (rest assured, we don’t receive a commission or anything else from the Associated Press).

But we have given the AP a heads-up about the FAQ goof, and we’re curious to see how quickly it gets fixed.

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Don’t get held back in Old School

May 18, 2009 | Posted in: General Writing, Old School | Tags: antonyms, business writing, editing, editing tips, Merriam-Webster, Microsoft Word, Old School, Old School Dave, Roget's Thesaurus, synonyms, thesaurus, Thesaurus.com, We Write For You, wewriteforyou.com, Word, writing tips |

We have a buddy we’ll call Old School Dave. (Yes, names have been changed to protect the guilty.) He’s a great writer, but it’s been a Herculean effort trying to get him to adopt even the simplest technological advances.

For Dave, the electric typewriter had too many bells and whistles. If he could do so profitably, he’d probably write with a quill.

Good for propping up your monitor... and not much else.

So leave it to Dave: the other day he asks to borrow our Roget’s Thesaurus. For anyone unfamiliar with the book, it’s the world’s most-widely used compendium of synonyms and antonyms.

It’s also, in the 21st century, largely obsolete. If you have a dedicated connection to the internet, as even Dave has, just go to Thesaurus.com, where you can easily input a term and get synonyms and antonyms in seconds.

Also, if you just need a couple of quick options and you’re working in Microsoft Word, just highlight the word and right-click: the software provides several synonyms (for most common words), and if none of those work, you can open Word’s internal thesaurus from there.

Several other word processing applications also have internal thesauruses. And there are other good online thesauruses at Merriam-Webster and The Free Dictionary, among others.

As for the big Roget book, we haven’t tossed it in the recycling bin yet. It’s still quite handy–mostly for squashing bugs.

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