AP changes "e-mail" to "email"

Style is important, but there's a lot of (not all) style arguments have the tendency to piss me off. A bunch of wasted time and energy on something 99.9999999999 percent of our readers don't give two fucks about.

This goes double for the style argument that keeps a page out past deadline because someone had a hissy fit about whether a line was 0.6 instead of 0.5.

 

RBIs.
POWs.
ICBMs.

Take that, SOBs.

 

Good point, there. For the most part, I don't want to belabor the point. I might agree, I might not, but just tell me what the "ruling" is and be consistent about it.

My biggest pet peeve is when I get AP stories and they can't follow obvious stuff in their own stylebook.

 

Csection. Hbomb.

I think we need to take this to its logical conclusion: Little Billy was gr8 in his basketball game.

 

1) No. And 2) RBI. 8)

 

Isn't ICBMs in a different class than the others? The rest have the noun as the first letter, within the acronym, while missile is at the end of ICBM, making it ok ... god I'm a nerd

 

"Always with the negative waves, Moriarty!"

 

Another one I noticed: a city in India is now spelled differently.

It's now "Kolkata" (not Calcutta)

In a related move, Associated Press announced that the bleak, northeast Lower Peninsula of Michigan town is now officially "Al's Penis"

 

Always with the negative waves, Manfredi... always with the negative waves...

 

I'm WAY less anal about style than I was 10 years ago, and some would say that's a negative, and others would say thank god.

But here's the thing about readers not giving two fucks about it: I've actually learned that there's a fairly large segment of readers that still cares MORE about this than you'd think, but also, If you have RBI in one paragraph, and RBIs two paragraphs later, people notice. They notice glaring inconsistency.

 

And you have to have the discussions about it. It's a misconception that you should just accept them without thinking about it.

If you do that, you'll still come to the point where you have to make the decision out in the field and will choose what feels right to you. Well, what feels right to you might be exactly what's leading to those inconsistencies SF refers to.

It's always better to understand why something is the way it is, style-wise.