The new AP Stylebook entry

By Kenneth Boone (Contact) | Alex City Outlook

Published Friday, February 12, 2010

I guess its official now – we’re living in a newly defined economic era.

I subscribe to the Associated Press Stylebook’s online edition. For non-journalists, the Associated Press is an organization that gathers and distributes news reported by its members as well as generating news on its own. Because it’s the No. 1 news organization in the world, and because most newspapers and other news organizations are members, the style used by the Associated Press has become, in most cases, the de facto writing style of reporters.

What’s writing style? If we write a story that calls our country “U.S.A.” and we publish an AP story in the same newspaper that calls it “USA,” which one is correct? Despite what you learned in high school, the Associated Press Stylebook says it would be “USA,” the abbreviation for “United States of America,” with no periods.

However, if we shortened the abbreviation to “U.S.” then AP Style requires periods after the “U” and the “S.”

I’m not sure why, other than it looks better – that’s not the point. The AP Stylebook doesn’t give explanations, just edicts. And thousands of journalists around the world follow suit so they don’t have the same thing spelled two different ways in their publications.

Often, AP Style is different from traditional English. One I see all the time involves the position of punctuation and quotation marks.

In your high school English class, that sentence a few inches up should be punctuated with the commas outside the quotation marks, thusly: According to the Associated Press Stylebook, it would be “USA”, the abbreviation for “United States of America”, with no periods.

However, almost no journalist would write it that way because of this infamous AP Stylebook entry: “Follow these long-established printers’ rules: –the period and the comma always go within the quotation marks.”

The current AP Stylebook contains more than 400 pages (in AP Style, it’s preferred to say “more than” instead of “over”). It’s an exhaustive text. And staying compliant with AP Style is a real task. I’m sure I’ve probably lost a style point or two already in this column.

All that is written so you’ll understand the importance of my next few sentences.

On Wednesday, Feb. 10, the AP Stylebook Online sent out this updated entry:

“Great Recession”

“The recession that began in December 2007 and became the longest and deepest since the Great Depression of the 1930s. It occurred after losses on subprime mortgages battered the U.S. housing market.”

Like the “Great Depression,” which you’ll notice is capitalized as a proper noun designating a single event, there will only be one “Great Recession” in U.S. history.

We’re in it.

This period of time now has an official name, a name with capital letters. It will be referred to as the Great Recession from now on by journalists around the world.

So gather up your “back” in ‘09” stories. In 20 years you can tell your children or grandchildren or great-grandchildren about when you survived the Great Recession.

These last several years were historic bad times.

The good news is the Great Recession is mostly behind us: we’ve survived and better times will come.

Just thought you’d like to know what you lived through.

Kenneth Boone is publisher of The Alexander City Outlook. His column appears each weekend edition.

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