I mentioned in my post about my new editing business that I’d have to learn a new style manual. I began writing an explanation of what a style manual is for the benefit of folks unfamiliar with that, then realized it was getting long and it probably ought to be a separate post.
A style manual is a detailed manual on the use of language. Unlike many languages, which have regulatory agencies to decide how language is used, English doesn’t have anything like that. Instead, we have various style manuals. There is no universal agreement on how words should be spelled, when capital letters are to be used or when italics should be used. A style manual answers those questions, making the practice uniform no matter which individual writer or editor worked on it.
I’m accustomed to using the Associated Press Stylebook, which is a really good style manual for news writing. Most American news organizations follow AP style at least to some extent; even if they have their own in-house style manual, they’ll usually follow the AP on many things.
For example, the Indian city of Bombay changed its name to Mumbai in 1995. I’m not sure why, but the AP continued to call the city Bombay. I don’t know of any U.S. newspaper, radio or TV network that has a bureau in India, so most get their news of India from the AP. They could have edited their AP stories to call the city Mumbai, but most didn’t until the AP changed its practice years later.
Also, in 2020, the AP started using a capital B in “Black” when it’s used as a racial term, but it continues to use lower case for “white.” The rationale is that most white people have a more specific ethnicity; they know they have Scottish or Polish or Italian ancestors or whatever. But for Black people, being Black effectively is their ethnic group. Few Black Americans know what part of Africa their ancestors where kidnapped from or what languages they spoke before being forced to come to America and learn English. That is just one of hundreds of pieces of language guidance in AP style; it even instructs writers to use a period after the S in Harry S. Truman. (He had just the letter S rather than a middle name. He was inconsistent about whether to use a period after the S.)
AP style is a product of technology. The company didn’t have a style manual until the late 1940s. That’s because the teletype machines used until then didn’t distinguish between capital and lower case letters. They would print a story in all capitals. At the newspaper, an editor would mark it up with a pencil, indicating which letters were to be capitalized and making spelling corrections in accordance with the newspaper’s style. So it didn’t matter much if one AP writer used the spellings “cigarette” and “doughnut” and one used “cigaret” and “donut”; individual newspapers could choose their preferred spellings.
This changed with the introduction of the TTS, or teletypesetter. Suddenly the AP was transmitting a story in both capital and lower case letters. At the newspaper, the TTS would spit out a ticker tape punched with holes, much like the roll put into a player piano. The Linotype operator could feed this tape into the Linotype machine and it would automatically set the story into type. The newspaper could get by with fewer editors and fewer Linotype operators with this labor-saving technology. But it also meant the AP had to have its own staff be consistent with spelling and capitalization.
Also, it meant the AP could only use the characters in the TTS system, which didn’t include the % symbol or square brackets. For decades after, AP style called for spelling out the word “percent” and for using parentheses instead of square brackets. AP style doesn’t use italics because of the limitations of the TTS (though I suspect today that remains because of problems like losing formatting when you copy and paste text on computers).
The AP’s main competitors, United Press and International News Service, merged in 1951 to form United Press International. UPI came up with its own style manual and had no reason to be consistent with the AP. But newspapers that were customers of both AP and UPI found this incredibly frustrating, so in the 1970s, the two wire services agreed to have their style committees meet together to come up with one style manual for both.
At this point, most newspapers either rewrote their style manuals to match this new wire service manual or just kept a short list of style practices specific to the newspaper’s audience. For example, when I worked at the student newspaper of the University of Minnesota, we would use a capital G in “Greek” when it referred to Greece, but lower case when it referred to fraternities and sororities. This was particularly useful in headlines where it was hard to fit “fraternity” and we wanted to avoid “frat” because fraternity members often found that offensive. A headline that says “15 arrested at greek keg party” makes it clear that we’re not talking about a party in Greece.
AP style offers vague guidance under the heading “obscenities, profanities, vulgarities.” The entry begins, “Do not use them in stories unless they are part of direct quotations and there is a compelling reason for them.” But it offers no guidance about what is “compelling” or who should make that call. (It does helpfully note that it should be “goddamn it” and not “God damn it.”)
By contrast, The Philadelphia Inquirer’s style manual has an exhaustive list of foul language divided into three categories. Mild profanity including “hell” and “damn” can be approved by low-level editors. Intermediate profanity must be approved by higher-level editors and the words deemed most offensive must get the approval of very high-ranking editors. The Yiddish terms “schmuck” and “putz” fell into different categories depending on how they were used; they were low-level profanity when used to mean a contemptible person but intermediate when used in reference to the male anatomy.
The books I’ve ordered are a used copy of the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, 6th Edition, as well as a new copy of the 7th Edition. The 6th Edition is good through the end of 2020; starting Jan. 1, everybody is supposed to switch to the 7th. I’ll probably post later about the differences between editing news and editing academic works.