Jumping into a freelance writing career is very exciting. Bursting with ideas, writers sit down in front of their computers anxious to discover what this wide, wonderful world has in store for them. Unfortunately, they often find tons of advice full of industry lingo that can be a bit confusing. Here is the first in the latest Article Quickie series designed to help you hit the ground running: AP Stylebook or AP Style Called the journalist’s bible, the AP Stylebook is a listing of how things like grammar, religions, titles, times etc. should be written within the text of an [Read more…]
A Large Percentage of People Use % In Writing
June 26, 2010. 9 Comments
I’d like to take a few paragraphs to vent, if you don’t mind. If you read this column regularly, you know I typically follow AP style — and so do most of my clients. In AP Style, when you’re writing statistics or percentages, you should use numerals followed by the word percent. Even if the number is less than ten (2 percent) you should use the numeral and the word percent. When do you use the percent sign (%)? Never. This rule is, incidentally, the same in the Chicago Manual of Style. However, many bloggers (and even some print publication [Read more…]
Is the Freelance Writing Jobs Network Grammatically Correct?
March 28, 2010. 8 Comments
We look at the header for this blog every day and never think twice about it. It’s the Freelance Writing Jobs Network, a blog network and community for freelance writers. But are we all really “freelance writers?” Or “free lance writers?” Or, to complicate things further, might we be “free-lance writers?” Deb, you’ve got it right. It’s freelance. It wasn’t always, but it is now. “Freelance” is one of those words like “email” where the hyphen has been dropped. Freelancing’s Gray Area Those who run free lance writing blogs or even “free-lance” writing blogs aren’t exactly wrong. Dictionary.com, which draws [Read more…]
The Great Space Debate
March 27, 2010. 7 Comments
Virtual Assistant Tracey Tarrant of TCT Business Solutions writes in with a punctuation/style question. She asks: What is proper when starting a new sentence… one space after the period (or question mark, etc.) or two? For example: I went to the store. I bought milk. or I went to the store. I bought milk. That’s a good question! Tracey didn’t realize she was touching on a hotbed issue with writers of every ilk, a debate as heated as “Coke or Pepsi,” “Burger King or McDonald’s,” “Starbucks or Tim Horton’s.” (I can hear health-conscious friends of mine saying, “None of the [Read more…]
Using Numbers in Writing
March 13, 2010. 7 Comments
As with so many other grammar and style rules and conventions, the way we write numbers has changed as blogging has grown. More and more writers now use numerals in all instances rather than spelling out numbers below 10. It makes sense; numbers are easy to read and catch your eye on the computer screen. But according to both the AP style guide and the Chicago Manual of Style — it’s wrong. I confess to straying from this rule recently, until one client steered me back in the right direction. I won’t break this hard-and-fast rule again! (Unless, of course, [Read more…]
Online AP Stylebook Resources
October 17, 2009. 3 Comments
We just bought a house and I’ve spent the past few weeks moving. I snail mailed a contract to a new client because my printer isn’t hooked up. My office is filled with boxes and baby clothes (which need to get shuttled into the attic closets in our new cape) and I have 15 + years of magazines in Rubbermaid containers stacked in corners of the room. Why am I sharing all this? I jumped in as FWJ’s Grammar Guide in the midst of a hectic week and began tossing grammar rules at you. I hope you didn’t mind and [Read more…]
