It’s often mused that not straying from your ways limits your personal and professional growth—keeping an open mind and trying new things is generally preferred.
I try to live by these clichéd credos, but when it comes to one large aspect of my job, I think sticking to my ways has proved invaluable. And that would be editing. By the time I made it through elementary school and beyond, diagramming sentences was a thing of the past, but through several advanced writing courses, excellent mentors and individual research, I’ve become well versed in the ways of the English language. I even penned the Mustang Editorial Style Guide, dictating the way Mustang materials are supposed to be written (and edited). This also grants us a certain level of freedom from the strict style guides available, but we never want to stray too far from them, either.
With that in mind, I thought it prudent to order the latest AP Style Manual in preparation for updating our own style guide, and creating others for various clients (I selected AP Style because it tends to be more consistent and straightforward than the Chicago Style Manual, and is widely respected across industries). And I was surprised to discover that my rut had a few potholes (now, to give myself some credit, none of these are anything that would sink an article or an ad, and like I said, companies often adopt their own writing rules, but these stood out as valuable changes).
There are three AP Style guidelines and rules that stood out to me, though I won’t be uniformly adopting all of them. Why? That’s easier to discuss with specifics. So let’s get to it.
1. Flier vs. flyer: When it comes to the printed document of the pamphlet persuasion that Mustang writes and designs for clients, I had always written as “flyer.” AP Style shamed me with its haughty correction, stating, “Flier is the preferred term for an aviator or a handbill. Flyer is the proper name of some trains and buses: The Western Flyer.” Oh. Now, the term “preferred” is critical here, because that means this isn’t a hard-and-fast rule, so I will leave it up to the discretion of the client if they choose to change the way they’ve spelled the word; for Mustang, though, I’m going to side with preferred.
2. Hyphens without modifiers: Hyphens have become the bane of the Mustang team’s existence, and for good reason. They are the trickiest of punctuation tools (the semicolon acts tough, but is pretty easy to figure out with a bit of practice and reading). Even AP Style concedes, “Use of the hyphen is far from standardized.” But one section gave me notice: and that’s hyphenating a modifier whether or not it precedes a noun if it comes after a form of the verb “to be.” Confused yet? Here are some correct examples: The coworker is well-dressed. He works full time. He has a full-time job. Uh, just leave this one to me, guys.
3. No. 1: Far and away my least favorite AP Style discovery. I’ve often felt unsteady about writing “number-one school,” because the hyphen feels unnecessary—people know you are ranking the school, so is the hyphen really needed to help clarify the statement? AP Style seems to avoid any hyphen confusion by decreeing that number ranks be abbreviated and using numerals. Their example is, “He was my No. 1 choice.” Ick. The random capitalization, the abbreviation, the use of numerals for a number less than nine—none of it works for me. Stricken from the record!
Whether or not I feel sturdy enough in my position as an editor to shrug off the rules of AP Style, it’s been an interesting journey to check my work against such an esteemed guidebook and remind myself that, even in the most rote of tasks, there’s still room to be challenged.