It’s not merely coincidence that so many of the major newspapers in the world (published in English) manage so many of the details of news writing in uniform ways. It is a coordinated effort in which the industry essentially agrees:
“Okay, this is how we’re going to do certain things. We’re going to spell out numbers one through nine, and use Arabic numerals to indicate most amounts larger than that, such as 10, 122, or 675. But we’re not going to write out long numbers which have many zeroes, such as 14 million.”
The book which lays out that concerted method is the Associated Press Stylebook and Briefing on Media Law. It’s commonly referred to in newsrooms as the A.P. Stylebook (or style guide) or as “The Journalist’s Bible.”
What Is Included In the A.P. Stylebook?
First, understand what the A.P. Stylebook is not. It is not a dictionary or thesaurus which lists tens of thousands of words. By comparison, it is only 444 pages long.
The stylebook's function is to aid writers and editors in remembering those easy to forget peculiarities of the English language, and to provide a consistency of style that will not befuddle professionals in the field or readers of their product (the newspaper). It’s a necessary resource to be by the desk of anyone looking to make a living as a writer in journalism.
The general purpose of the stylebook is to assert proper usage of capitalization and punctuation, and to clarify certain definitions and word usages. For example, usage of “affect” and “effect” often are a stumbling block for writers.
- Effect is a noun. Example: Getting good grades in school caused a profitable effect; the woman got the big scholarship she wanted.
- In almost all cases, affect is a verb. Example: The snow storm affected the flights trying to leave the airport.
- The exception to the rule about "affect," is when using the phrase “effecting change.” Example: “Seeing litter along the street inspired the man to effect change in his community by cleaning up the neighborhood.”
In another example, newspapers do not use the United States Postal Service’s two-letter abbreviations for states, in which Missouri is reduced to MO and New York is noted as NY. The A.P. style lists protocol for each of the 50 states in a way that designates state names with five or fewer letters do not need to be abbreviated.
In the case of naming Des Moines, Iowa, that lets the whole state name be used. For Tulsa, Oklahoma, the A.P. abbreviation would be Tulsa, Okla. As exceptions to the rule, Juneau, Alaska and Honolulu, Hawaii are used in full.
The A.P. Stylebook is not a resource that is available online, but a journalism professional can use the Ask the Editor function at the A.P. Stylebook's Web site, to pose a question about style to an Associated Press editor or to search for answers already given to common style questions.
