AP Style Starters

AP Style Starters
By Ted Pease
Beginning News Writing handout

The Associated Press is the world’s leading news-gathering organization, and provides both wire news and photo services to member organizations. The AP also developed what is considered the bible of style and usage for news writing.

The AP was born in 1848, when the advent of the telegraph created opportunities for news from afar. Telegraphy also was expensive, however, and even though they were fierce competitors, representatives of six New York newspapers who devised the concept of a news “pool” for members realized that an association of member newspapers who could share resources was smart business.

Today, the AP has more than 15,000 member news organizations worldwide, all of whom contribute stories and photos to the AP’s wire service. For more on the AP, see “About the AP” in the AP Stylebook (p. 372).

The Stylebook is the final word on writing and usage style for news writing. The book is a valuable and fascinating resource for brief info on everything from baseball to religion to zoology, weather and business. Media professionals—in print, broadcasting, the Web, public relations and advertising—must know and use the AP Stylebook. This semester, you will begin to develop a close relationship with the Stylebook, well-thumbed copies of which can be found on the desks of all media professionals.

To begin getting acquainted with AP style rules, here is a list of some of the most important and common style rules that you will need to know. There are many other style rules—some important and some arcane—in the Stylebook, but these are some of the ones you’ll encounter most often. Let’s begin getting AP style-literate by learning these rules. Look up these entries and start learning them; note that many entries reference other, related entries. There will be regular quizzes on AP style, and beginning in Week 3, style errors in your stories will count against your grade. (Note: The really important entries are in bold face)

abbreviations and acronyms
academic departments
academic titles
addresses
affect, effect
ages
a.m., p.m.
brand names
capitalization
children
city council
collective nouns
composition titles
Congress
convince, persuade
county
courtesy titles
dimensions
directions and regions
dollars
essential clauses, nonessential clauses
essential phrases, nonessential phrases
fewer, less
food
geographic names
governor
holidays and holy days
hopefully
House of Representatives
hyphen
it’s, its
judge
lay, lie
legislative titles
legislature
military titles
millions, billions
months
names
numerals
organizations and institutions
party affiliation
plurals
police department
possessives
president
punctuation
quotations
race
second reference
sentences
spelling
state
state names
television program titles
temperatures
that (conjunction)
that, which (pronouns)
time element
times
titles
today, tonight
tomorrow
United Nations
U.S.
verbs
who, whom
women