The Write Blog

This question came up during a round of in-house editing this week, so – of course –I wanted to share: Complete this sentence:  I spent hours  _______ over the pages of the magazine. A.)   poring B.)   pouring The correct answer is A, “poring.” “Pore” means to study or read something with great care.  You’d pore [...]

A great tip from our friends at Shae Writing: This is a quick and easy way to find all the acronyms in an MS Word document. Remember that this command searches for consecutive capital letters, so it cannot distinguish between ‘SCBA’ and ‘DO NOT.’ For Word 2003: 1. Open the ‘Find’ window (Ctrl + F). [...]

Good news for all word nerds: The Associated Press has finally made the switch from the old-fashioned “Web site” to the simpler, more natural-looking “website.” Yay! To me, “Web site” has always seemed a little stuffy and English teacher-ish. Good for AP to know when it’s time to change things up. According to the AP’s [...]

Last week, we kicked off a mini-series of AP Stylebook-themed blog posts. This week, we’re sharing a few more gems of wisdom from The AP Stylebook Online. Q: What’s the rule for capitalizing a person’s title? A: It’s complicated, but here are the basics: AP defines a formal title as “one that denotes a scope [...]

Does “city-wide” need a hyphen? If you’re writing about a sculpture, should you italicize the title, or put it in quotation marks? The truth is, there’s no right answer. In most cases, style choices like this can vary from client to client. But what do you do when your client has no clear preference? Or [...]