Writing Style

Hopefully, I'm not "preaching to the choir" on this post. Recently, PRSA Tactics (a monthly publication of the Public Relations Society of America) titled their Feb. 2009 issue "The write way." They've done a couple of these, and to me, reading about the latest "trends" if you will in writing style is very interesting.

I should preface this by saying that a colleague of mine told me something very valuable a couple years ago. He said that there's a big difference between writing for college papers and journalistic writing. Through my four years of college, I got accustomed to APA (American Psychological Association) Style. APA Style consists of long paragraphs and punctuation like you wouldn't believe.

Which was part of my problem. My English professor, bless her heart, drilled APA Style very hard. So much to the point that I became "comma crazy." Not just commas, mind you, punctuation altogether. But this colleague of mine reminded me that "less is more" and also that you don't want an incredible amount of punctuation to slow down your readers.

Another piece of writing style that drives me crazy is which words are hyphenated; and which are not. This colleague of mine once again taught me something very valuable - if the combination of words are written in an adjective form, then they are hyphenated. For example, "low-income housing."

Here's writing style you probably wouldn't see in an AP Stylebook; but would find in the PRSA Tactics January 2009 issue (15 for '09 - New media terms for a new year): media terminology. For instance, "cell phone" is two words; yet, BlackBerry is one word, note the upper-case letters. The same rule applies to MySpace, YouTube, and one that really drives me crazy: LinkedIn. Every time I see that one in an e-mail, I have to look twice. For me, the lower-case "d" and upper-case "I" being so close together makes it hard to read sometimes.

For the record, your Yahoo, Gmail or POP Mail accounts would be written as "e-mail." Here's one that was interesting to me, "blog," is short for "Web log," and therefore is not capitalized, neither is "podcast" or "videocast."

As we move into a world with less newspapers, and more blogs and social-networking sites; it is fun to examine how the rules are changing, right before our eyes.