29 Oct Interactive Course: Grammar Girl’s Guide to AP Style
Should you refer to that golf club as a “three-wood” or a “3-wood”?
Is the condition properly called Down’s syndrome, Down syndrome or Down’s Syndrome?
If you miss (or never worked for) that cigar-chomping editor who recognized and fixed every AP style goof, join America’s most popular grammar authority for a course on writing like a reporter.
Who better to guide you than the New York Times best-selling Grammar Girl, Mignon Fogarty? Master the Stylebook in a clear and easy series of short videos and quick quizzes.
Join her, and you’ll
- Learn about quirks and variations in punctuation
- Find out how to properly use collective nouns
- Correctly use numbers in headlines and copy from now on
- Learn when a dog should be referred to as “he” or “she,” rather than “it”
- Figure out how to handle names and initials, and when U.S. should be written US
- Avoid the common goofs copywriters make when writing about ranges of dollars, days, hours or percentages
Grammar Girl, Mignon Fogarty, brings clarity to matters such as
- The difference between writing styles and rules, and why AP style matters
- Exceptions to AP’s prohibition on the use of the serial or Oxford comma
- Tricky apostrophes, and whether it should be “Jones’ slippers” or “Jones’s slippers”
- Words you should avoid because they are offensive or libelous
- Collective nouns and singular nouns, and why the zombie horde is (not “are”) coming for us
- The proper use of company names, and whether it should be written “IKEA” or “Ikea.”
- How to use camel case
The AP Stylebook is the leading reference book for most reporters who receive your pitches. Even the PR department for University of Oxford follows AP style, meaning Oxford’s press releases omit the Oxford comma.
Master the quirks of company names and products. Should you capitalize the first letter in “iPhone” or “eBay” when the brand name starts a sentence? Should there be a comma before “Inc.”? How do you make “McDonald’s” a possessive? Fogarty reveals the answers to such questions in her clear and memorable style.
Find out when age is relevant, how to handle names of family members and whether it’s “JFK” or “J.F.K.” Learn how to deal with millions and billions in headlines.
Find out why the T in “The Home Depot Corp.” is capitalized but “the Starbucks Corp.” doesn’t get the same treatment. Learn to write sensitively about diseases and conditions, and why you’d better revise that reference calling an employee wheelchair-bound.
Avoid ageism and sexism with easy rewrites that make grammatical sense, and gain the peace of mind that comes with knowing you’re doing things the right way.
Join Mignon Fogarty, and smarten up your style. Click here to sign up now.