For an American print journalist, it is impossible to overestimate the importance of the Associated Press Stylebook.
Hold the phone. Is that instead Style Book? Just checking here … no. Got it right the first time. But it never hurts to look it up.
Because as someone who has both filed copy and edited copy that needs to adhere to AP style for over 40 years — my college paper uses it, too — I just hate to get it wrong. And I do mean wrong. If it’s not edited to the style used by this paper and hundreds of others around the country and the world before it hits print or the web, as far as I’m concerned, it’s wrong.
It may not be libelous, or boring. But it’s incorrect. Cringeworthy.
A few larger papers have their own stylebooks. The style in the San Francisco Chronicle for the things in a pack of Marlboros used to be, enormously eccentrically, “cigaret.” It made no sense, since “ette,” from the French, is how we in English designate something made littler. Like a small cigar, for instance. But if I were an editor at the old Chron, I would have been religious about adhering to style.
It’s true that my own obsession with AP style borders on the fetishistic. But I am not alone. I ran across a wonderful point from the novelist Lorrie Moore the other day: “Writers have no real area of expertise. They are merely generalists with a highly inflamed sense of punctuation.”
See, the commas all in the right place, the proper use of the semicolon; these are not small things to me. They are like a carpenter’s tools for a writer. If they aren’t good tools and you don’t know how to use them, your table — or your story — is going to fall apart.
It’s not that the AP Stylebook is infallible. Far from it. It’s that it’s our bible, and if we don’t all follow its dictates, mere anarchy is loosed upon the world. But you can lobby for changes. Argue for your cause with enough logic and eventually you will prevail. One day, decades ago, Charles Cherniss, a columnist I had grown up reading who when I became editor of the Pasadena Star-News I suddenly found myself his boss, came into my office.
“Lawrence,” he said — very formal — “let’s ditch percent and go with %.” “No can do, Chuck,” I said. “I agree with the sentiment. Less is more, and whatnot. But AP style is AP style, and I ain’t gonna buck it.”
He would try, in his copy, and I would just have to change it back.
Finally, a couple of years ago, AP relented. % it is.
But especially in the pre-digital age, when the stylebook was print-only, revised every few years, and your cheap newspaper had to buy a bunch of new copies, it could take ages to make a change. Now, when they feel so inclined, the College of Cardinals of the Associated Press can issue their version of a papal bull after whatever mysterious machinations they must go through and post the new style online.
As you may have heard, the famously slow-to-change AP has not been willing to quickly undo a geographical name that has been in use for more than four centuries at the whim of one American president. The Gulf of Mexico is that body of water down below Louisiana. It is very true, if odd, that a president can wave his hand and by executive order rename an American property.
Thus, the current president renamed, no doubt temporarily, the tallest mountain in the United States from Denali, which is what the locals have called it since time immemorial, to McKinley, after a president who never saw the place. The AP said, sure — it’s within the United States, and the president can call it what he likes.
The Gulf of Mexico is not within the United States. The president cannot rename it. The rest of the world gets a say. The AP, contrary to the letter-writers, is the least political organization ever. As it noted in its own bland story about the fracas: “The AP said last month that it would continue to refer to the Gulf of Mexico while noting Trump’s decision to rename it as well. As a global news agency that disseminates news around the world, the AP says it must ensure that place names and geography are easily recognizable to all audiences.” And for this middle-of-the-road stance, the Associated Press finds itself banned from the White House and pool coverage of the presidency. This president is, as we Irish say, beyond the pale.
Larry Wilson is on the Southern California News Group editorial board. lwilson@scng.com.
