Read Archived Articles>>

CSJ Blog>>

No. 31 for August 2004

Common Sense Journalism

AP’s change raises an ageless issue

By Doug Fisher

The new Associated Press Stylebook has changed style on ages.

Ages of people and animals remain figures. But for inanimate things such as laws, buildings, books, etc., one through nine are spelled out: a 3-year-old boy, a three-year-old law.

“Setting style on numbers is like walking in quicksand, but we’ve added another foot of safe ground,” Norm Goldstein, the stylebook’s longtime editor, wrote in Copy Editor newsletter.

I disagree. I think AP has made the quicksand pit larger and, to mix metaphors, muddier. Copy desks now have one more mindless error to fix when their efforts should go to more substantial issues.

I’ve never seen an adequate explanation for this style already used by the New York Times, for instance. Goldstein e-mailed me that AP wanted to be “more definite in our intent, which was to use numerals only for ages of people (and, by an extension of two legs, animals). Buildings and laws don’t have ‘ages’ in the same sense.”

Bill Walsh of The Washington Post reasons in Lapsing Into a Comma that “it doesn’t seem right to extend this privilege” of numerals for ages “to inanimate objects or to months as opposed to years.”

But neither is particularly satisfying, and if you follow the no-numerals-for-inanimate-things logic, then you shouldn’t write “the law’s effect” or “the restaurant’s food.” Neither deserves the “respect” of possession; how can an inanimate object possess anything? But writing “the effect of the law” or “the food of the restaurant” can be silliness despite what some strict grammarians might say about false possessives.

Style, of course, reflects an effort to put some order into the vagaries and contradictions of life and needs to evolve. Publications often see style as part of their identity, and some stubbornly resist change. But compare the size of the AP’s or Times’ (or is that Times’s) stylebooks with those of 25 years ago to see how it is getting out of hand.

I have tremendous respect for the job Goldstein does in balancing competing interests. But now, when we’re asking people to work across media, it’s time for a Style Simplification Movement. The AP Managing Editors and American Society of Newspaper Editors should work to simplify and standardize, hopefully avoiding the rancor so often associated with grammatically charged subjects. I’ve already suggested that “another,” “over,” “percent” and “none,” among others, need reassessment. Some others:

-- Numbers: Why not use one to nine in all but the fewest of cases: money, addresses, with the percent sign instead of “percent”? There might be a few others, but I don’t see lesser understanding in writing that snow was nine inches, instead of 9 inches, deep. And that would make a three-year-old child and a three-year-old law. Or, go with all figures.

-- Why not use the serial comma? No need to vacillate on whether this is a “short” or “long” series, and we eliminate the “ham and eggs” exception. Saving lead isn’t an issue, and most students now must “unlearn” what they’ve been taught in English.

Let’s also look at the “if the introductory phrase is short enough, no need for a comma” exception. How short is short? The Working with Words authors suggest the comma in all cases to be consistent and avoid arbitrariness. I like their reasoning, but this might just as well be deleted and left to editorial judgment.

-- Hyphens: If high school student, orange juice salesman or health care plan does not need a hyphen, why do five-mile walk, light-blue sky or well-known singer? Are they any less understandable without a hyphen? Let’s reduce the arbitrariness. Walsh advocates broad use of hyphens and be done with it. I like that, but I’d be just as fine with eliminating most hyphens except for those rare cases of understanding (small-business man).

And why not just follow the first-listed spelling in the designated dictionary. People don’t seem to have trouble with preempt, instead of pre-empt, for instance, and many publications already use the solid forms.

-- Abbreviations: People don’t say “No. 1.” They say “number one.” So in quotes, let’s limit abbreviations, the opposite of current style.

Everything can’t be standardized, but style, if it isn’t easily accessible, gets short shrift until a copy editor must deal with it. That’s inefficient use of increasingly scarce resources.

Among some other AP changes this year:

-- After ditching “innocent,” AP now officially sanctions “not guilty,” but admonishes to guard against dropping the not. Innocent can wrongly imply a defendant must prove innocence.

-- “Troops” may now refer to a large number, not just several groups, so 10,000 troops is OK, but not five troops. AP changed “to accept the inevitable” Goldstein wrote in Copy Editor.

-- In a bit of interplanetary respect, AP now capitalizes Martian, Venusian and other adjectives from planets’ proper names. However, AP’s online stylebook had the change under “heavenly bodies” but not under “planets.” Goldstein has corrected that, but the discrepancy might exist in early printed versions.

In one disputed area, the AP is not following the Times and others and will stick with al-Qaida instead of al Qaeda (although the wire is far from consistent). “The diacritical mark involved in Arabic generally represents the ‘i’ or ‘ih’ sound,” Goldstein wrote to me. “We went with al-Qaida because it seemed closest to the pronunciation in English and because it is the transliteration used most often by Arabic dictionaries and other academic Arabic publications.”