I keep a copy of the AP's Guide to Punctuation on my my nightstand. It's not the stylebook, which obviously can change from place to place, but does illustrate things like why the Oakland A's have had multiple MVPs.
Not bad for a book with only 93 pages, but maybe you can find something from this decade though.
https://www.amazon.com/Associated-Press-Guide-Punctuation/dp/0738207853
― pplains, Tuesday, 20 February 2018 03:51 (six years ago) link
The style guide for Chicago is pretty compressed and good. It's sort of like a shortened version of Garland's Oxford guide to American English usage.
― Pataphysician, Tuesday, 20 February 2018 04:01 (six years ago) link
I hit the AP Stylebook online often. I don't agree with everything they come up with (though I do have to abide by their rules), but it is interesting to see at least why they write the rules they write.
― pplains, Tuesday, 20 February 2018 04:40 (six years ago) link
thanks everyone, this is all v helpful <3
― Squeaky Fromage (VegemiteGrrl), Tuesday, 20 February 2018 05:53 (six years ago) link
Just read my posts
― DUMPKINS! (darraghmac), Tuesday, 20 February 2018 11:55 (six years ago) link
then delete them
― mark s, Tuesday, 20 February 2018 12:08 (six years ago) link
:o
― DUMPKINS! (darraghmac), Tuesday, 20 February 2018 12:26 (six years ago) link
this is an amaaaazing book on editing. it's about academic rather than newspaper editing, but there's so much helpful stuff
https://sites.duke.edu/niou/files/2014/07/WilliamsJosephM1990StyleTowardClarityandGrace.pdf
― Chuck_Tatum, Tuesday, 20 February 2018 12:45 (six years ago) link
When I was active as a copyeditor (USian term, sorry), the standard book to follow was Karen Judd's Copyediting: A Practical Guide. If I chance to leaf through it nowadays it seems dated, and very focused on practical aspects of paper-based work.
Speaking as an ex-newspaper employee and ex-journalism major, I agree with Aimless's post. It's more important to show you can make murky things clear (and correct the most howlingly egregious errors) than to master every nuance of using em dashes, en dashes, hyphens, etc. Most of those are issues of style rather than right/wrong.
I hire editors from time to time, and I like to look for a basically chill, audience-centric philosophy of editing. Vastly prefer that over dogmatic rigidity or encyclopedic memorized technical knowledge.
Consider one or more books by Bill Walsh, whose irreverent, pragmatic attitude is very much simpatico with my own. Look for The Elephants of Style if you can.
― persona non gratin (Ye Mad Puffin), Tuesday, 20 February 2018 14:38 (six years ago) link
speaking as someone currently employed as a proofreader and someone who has taken (and passed) a lot of editing tests, you are almost definitely overthinking it. virtually every copy editing test I've taken has focused on basic grammar, punctuation and usage errors, possibly some AP/Chicago style points (for a newspaper, you're probably going to deal with AP). editing for clarity/brevity generally doesn't show up, probably because those things are A) subjective and B) harder to deliberately insert into a story than a misspelling. as far as style, I've taken a surprising amount of editing tests where they just give you a style guide and dictionary during the test.
so if I were to brush up on anything before an editing test for a print publication, it'd actually be proofreading marks.
― algorithm is a dancer (katherine), Tuesday, 20 February 2018 15:14 (six years ago) link
katherine speaks wisdom
― persona non gratin (Ye Mad Puffin), Tuesday, 20 February 2018 15:54 (six years ago) link
thank you!!!it’s def prob just paranoia/overthinking. i just worry that i’m underqualified. i’ve been writing for a very small publication & i am not sure if my skills measure up, even tho i really want the job.
― Squeaky Fromage (VegemiteGrrl), Tuesday, 20 February 2018 17:50 (six years ago) link
Lopez' or Lopez's - both look, not great.
― Fizzles, Thursday, 12 July 2018 12:15 (five years ago) link
The latter is correct (per Chicago at least)
― rob, Thursday, 12 July 2018 12:42 (five years ago) link
de Lopez
― nonsensei (Ye Mad Puffin), Thursday, 12 July 2018 12:43 (five years ago) link
kidding; definitely the second.
apostrophe s unless you're dealing with an archaic set phrase ("good friend for Jesus' sake forbear")
― nonsensei (Ye Mad Puffin), Thursday, 12 July 2018 12:45 (five years ago) link
thanks all. makes sense.
― Fizzles, Thursday, 12 July 2018 13:11 (five years ago) link
i tend to go without additional s tho have some rules that i can’t remember right now where that doesn’t hold. failed at lopez tho without the s looked wrongerer.
― Fizzles, Thursday, 12 July 2018 13:14 (five years ago) link
in fact why i ever began to think it might be lópez’ is now alarming me. i haven’t been sleeping much recently.
― Fizzles, Thursday, 12 July 2018 13:16 (five years ago) link
I tend to follow Chicago on this, as in most things. But there is another school of thought that how you punctuate should reflect how you would say it. Which may vary depending on your dialect, your speech community, and the tone of what you're writing.
That is, if you would say "Jennifer Lopezzes career" then write Lopez's. If you would say "Jennifer Lopezz career" write Lopez'.
But that approach is too loosey-goosey for me.
― nonsensei (Ye Mad Puffin), Thursday, 12 July 2018 13:24 (five years ago) link
If the 's' at the end of the word sounds like an 's', than use apostrophe-s.
If the 's' at the end of the word does not make an esss sound, just use the apostrophe.
"Illinois' roads are better-constructed than Arkansas' roads."
But Lopez is so close, but not exactly an 's', so I'd use an apostrophe. We have an editor here, let's say her last name is Fritz, and we use only the apostrophe for its possessive form.
― pplains, Thursday, 12 July 2018 13:37 (five years ago) link
Wait a minute, I think I confused myself there.
― pplains, Thursday, 12 July 2018 13:38 (five years ago) link
S at the end of the word - don't use an apostrophe.
― pplains, Thursday, 12 July 2018 13:40 (five years ago) link
huh?
― nonsensei (Ye Mad Puffin), Thursday, 12 July 2018 14:02 (five years ago) link
the basic gist of the Chicago rule (at least in the 16th ed.; I don't have the 17th) for possessives is that you leave off the second s only when the word is plural, so "Illinois's roads" versus "many states' roads." No need to follow CMOS of course, but using pronunciation as a guide could get tricky as YMP said. For example, I'd be curious how pplains's rule would work in the part of Illinois where I grew up; there we pronounced Des Moines, "duh moyn," and Des Plaines, "dess plains."
― rob, Thursday, 12 July 2018 14:51 (five years ago) link
I favor making every singular noun possessive with apostrophe s, no matter what sound they end in, including s and z. I have never (until now) heard anyone advance the claim that a silent s should be treated differently.
The historical set phrase thing is an exception that I grudgingly accept if people think it's important.
Every regular plural noun gets s apostrophe. Irregular plurals (like people or children) generally get apostrophe s.
Usually this discussion bogs down around weirder cases like Joneses', where you have an existing s or z sound plus an additional s/z sounds that signal plural and possessive usages. Usageses. Usages's's. DAMMIT
― nonsensei (Ye Mad Puffin), Thursday, 12 July 2018 15:10 (five years ago) link
my spouse bought me a magazine containing this sentence:
"Either/Or, her stylish North Williams breakfast bar-cum-drinking den."
do you think this was on purpose?
― milkshake duck george bernard shaw (rushomancy), Sunday, 9 September 2018 14:42 (five years ago) link
that is a correct usage afaik
― kinder, Sunday, 9 September 2018 15:27 (five years ago) link
but I would have used a different phrase in that context...
― kinder, Sunday, 9 September 2018 15:28 (five years ago) link
It would only be correct if there were a hyphen between drinking and den, imo.
― Alba, Sunday, 9 September 2018 15:34 (five years ago) link
Oh, and breakfast and bar too.
sorting out how to properly hyphenate that lengthy series of modifiers is reason enough not to try it tbh
― rob, Sunday, 9 September 2018 15:37 (five years ago) link
Or just drop the hyphens altogether. Xpost
― Alba, Sunday, 9 September 2018 15:39 (five years ago) link
In this case, cum is used as an unassimilated latin word rather than an English one (as in summa cum laude) and it means "with". I wonder whether the drinking den really is attached to the bar as a separate entity, or if author is just cheerfully misusing the word to mean "that might also be regarded as a".
It is normal for a sentence to have a verb. Although, it is possible that where rushomancy called it a sentence and inserted a period it would have been more accurate to call it a phrase and inserted an ellipses.
― A is for (Aimless), Sunday, 9 September 2018 18:31 (five years ago) link
ellipsis, ellipses is plural
― mark s, Sunday, 9 September 2018 18:54 (five years ago) link
you're right.
― A is for (Aimless), Sunday, 9 September 2018 19:08 (five years ago) link
as for the phrase at issue, i would rewrite, because i don't think the unwritten linkage in the phrases "breakfast bar" and "drinking den" -- while it's certainly there, which is why they don't absolutely demand hyphenation -- us strong enough to override the written linkage of the hyphens round cum: the problem isn't that you can't decode it on reread, it's that you stumble (and chuckle if you have an evil mind) on first read
hyphenating everything puts all the linkages at the exact same level, which doesn't get rid of the hiccup no hyphens is asking for dirty-mind trouble
"drinking den and/or breakfast bar" works i think (certainly it dodges the slight weirdness that Aimless is noting, that "cum" is arguably slightly misused here? and also the "he said cum teehee" thing)
― mark s, Sunday, 9 September 2018 19:17 (five years ago) link
us s/b is
stylish North Williams breakfast-and-drinking bar
― mick signals, Sunday, 9 September 2018 19:35 (five years ago) link
doesn't really even need the hyphens
― mark s, Sunday, 9 September 2018 19:41 (five years ago) link
^true. use hyphens to eliminate ambiguity, which you're not really in danger of here.
― rob, Sunday, 9 September 2018 19:53 (five years ago) link
i don't mean it as a technical grammar question. maybe i should have put it in "Words, usages, and phrases that annoy the shit out of you". the writer drops in a particularly unnecessary loanword in a context where one can't help but read it as the identical vernacular word.
― milkshake duck george bernard shaw (rushomancy), Sunday, 9 September 2018 21:01 (five years ago) link
Big style book changes at @nytimes: Since yesterday, we've dropped the courtesy titles – "Mr. Whatsisname", "Ms. So-and-So" – for stories about movies, pop music and TV 😱— Matthew Anderson (@MattAndersonNYT) October 9, 2018
rip mr. loaf, mr. pop
― mookieproof, Tuesday, 9 October 2018 19:43 (five years ago) link
hullo gaga, bostic, elllington
doctor sir warrior would be concerned if (a) not dead (b) ever once mentioned in the times anyway
― mark s, Tuesday, 9 October 2018 19:46 (five years ago) link
https://i.imgur.com/ZZPl6u1.jpg https://i.imgur.com/c2yC8gD.jpg
guardian 1, bbc nil
― mookieproof, Friday, 30 November 2018 13:54 (five years ago) link
seen on my Waitrose voucher"this does not include infant formulae"
there are many types of formula I guess, but there are also many types of, say, milk and it would be weird to pluralise to 'milks'?
― kinder, Saturday, 15 December 2018 23:44 (five years ago) link
Yeah that's definitely wrong
― the word dog doesn't bark (anagram), Saturday, 15 December 2018 23:50 (five years ago) link
That is not ungrammatical, strictly speaking, but is certainly a strange choice of expression. Also, when pluralizing Latin words that have been assimilated into daily English use, it is preferable to use the English form of plural, viz. formulas.
― A is for (Aimless), Sunday, 16 December 2018 00:35 (five years ago) link
not sure “formula” needs pluralizing
― k3vin k., Sunday, 16 December 2018 00:57 (five years ago) link
it doesn't, and in terms of style, it oughtn't.
― A is for (Aimless), Sunday, 16 December 2018 01:02 (five years ago) link