AP Style Two Point Oh
November 28th, 2006 Ryan Jones
Everything is going 2.0 nowadays, and with talk of the web about to go 3.0 I think that it’s time we started making our newspapers and magazines 2.0 compliant. Yes, I’m suggesting an AP Style 2.0.
For those of you unfamiliar with AP style, it’s basically a set of rules for how to write that all reporters use. Some of them are quite dumb when it relates to technology though. Here’s a list of changes I suggest:
- Stop Saying “Log On” when the user isn’t required to actually “log on”. This implies somebody has a password. If I don’t need a username and password, I can’t “log on”. The correct term here is visit. I don’t “log on” to your radio station’s webpage, I visit it.
- webpage and website should be one word, not two. “web site” is a redundant adjective-noun pair. We use “site” by itself, which means the web isn’t really needed as an adjective. “Website” is a noun. It makes more sense to use the noun than a redundant adjective-noun right? Besides, “web site” just looks stupid. Other examples are horsefly, carpark, etc.
- Stop capitalizing internet unless it’s the first word of the sentence. Internet is no more of a proper noun than atmosphere, sky, ground, universe, sea, etc. In fact, there are technically many internets. If I remove 7 computers from the internet, it’s still the internet.. it’s just not “The Internet”. It doesn’t make sense to capitalize it anymore, so let’s stop doing it.
What other rules do you think we should add?
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