Newsrooms around the globe call the Associated Press Stylebook their style guide. But there are plenty of AP Style pet peeves on my list.
In my real job, I use the Associated Press Stylebook as our official style guide. That’s true of most newsrooms around the country. By writing with the same style rules, newsrooms that are AP members can share their content with fellow members without requiring many rewrites to correct issues. But while I follow those guidelines in my real job, I can’t deny that there aren’t some serious AP Style pet peeves that I deal with on a daily basis.
AP Style dates back to 1951. It began as a 36-page guide with a goal of making AP writers better. It emphasized the importance of readability and preached against wordiness, Muck Rack says.
But there are certain things I wish they’d fix.
1. Street addresses
AP Style has specific rules about street addresses. If you’re referring to a street without a house number, you spell out the full name. If you have a house number, you abbreviate the words street, avenue and boulevard. So a mention of the White House by street address would be 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.
You don’t abbreviate road whether you have a house number or not. I can understand the decision not to abbreviate road, since it’s only a four-letter word. AP tends to not bother abbreviating words shorter than six letters. But the same road abbreviation rules prohibit you from abbreviating words that are longer than six letters like circle or turnpike.
Why can you abbreviate boulevard and not turnpike? Why can you abbreviate avenue but not circle?
2. State abbreviations
The way you handle a state name varies in terms of how it’s used. Let’s take the example of the Peach State. In the body of a story, you’d spell out Georgia. In the dateline, you’d use the traditional state abbreviation, Ga. If you’re using a mailing address in the story, you use the two-letter postal abbreviation, GA.
It gets more confusing depending on the state. For Colorado, you’d spell out the full name in the body of a story. For a dateline, you’d use Colo. If you’re listing a mailing address, it’d be CO.
Even for my home state of South Carolina, you’d write S.C. in the dateline and SC in a mailing address.
I agree with spelling out the name of the state in a story. I just wish the dateline and any mailing addresses would both use the same two-letter postal abbreviation. AP Style likes consistency, after all. So be consistent!
3. ‘Collide’ vs. ‘Crash’
There was a time when collide meant two moving things striking each other. If one moving thing struck a stationary thing, it was called a crash.
AP Style relaxed its “rule” on this, now allowing collide to mean that one or both moving things made contact with each other.
That irritates me. It irritates me almost as much as using impact as a verb when you mean affect. It doesn’t, however, irritate me as much as using due to when you mean because of.
4. The new name for child porn
The term “child pornography” still appears in various state and federal laws. But there has been a new effort to use a different name: “child sexual abuse material.”
The journalist in me sees the term “child porn” and thinks “10 characters,” which can fit in a headline. But this new term takes up 28 characters by itself. AP Style recommends headlines not exceed 60 characters (though I can’t remember the last time I’ve seen an AP headline that short.) At 28 characters, the new term takes up almost half of the characters a “good” headline should take up.
The DOJ explains that an international group working to combat child exploitation formally recognized ‘CSAM.” They feel it “better reflects the abuse that is depicted in the images and videos and the resulting trauma to the child.” The South Carolina Attorney General’s Office often includes a disclaimer in its news releases calling the new term “a more accurate reflection of the material involved in these heinous and abusive crimes.”
But it then suggests the word pornography “can imply the child was a consenting participant.”
Seriously: Who thinks that?? A child hasn’t reached the age of consent and therefore can’t legally consent to anything. Who honestly believes that a child would be a willing participant of that? (Other, of course, than the criminal who produces or distributes it?)
Exploiting a child is just about the worst thing anyone can do. Sexually abusing a child is so outrageously horrible that I honestly can’t believe anyone is arguing about what we call it.
I can’t fully blame AP Style for this change, since the DOJ and others are pushing this chance. But I could hope AP Style would, in the spirit of brevit, clarity and basic common sense, reject the foolishness.
5. Inconsistent hyphenation
The AP’s rules on hyphenating seem to add changes every year. I still remember a time when it called for email to always be hyphenated. Fortunately, they finally changed their minds on that.
But while they do insist you should hyphenate compound modifiers like one-way street and French-speaking person, they say you shouldn’t hyphenate third grade teacher. It feels like there should be a hyphen there.
AP Style notes that the rules are often left up to taste, which is a bigger problem with the language than the stylebook.
But it also changed the rules on dual heritage like African-American or German-American. Now, AP Style says, you drop those hyphens. Why? Journalist Henry Fuhrmann was one of the people who fought for the dropping of they hyphen, arguing that it made “an unnecessary and derogative diminution of American identities.”
“Those hyphens,” he wrote in a 2019 essay, “serve to divide even as they are meant to connect. Their use in racial and ethnic identities can connote an otherness, a sense that people of color are somehow not full citizens or fully American.”
Oddly enough, while I understand his point, I read phrases like Japanese American exactly the opposite way Fuhrmann did. To me, the hyphen sets the two ethnicities as equals. Removing the hyphen, the way I read it, diminishes the first, setting Japanese as a kind of American, putting the priority on the latter.
I don’t think there’s any one way to win on this one, but when the rules change and there’s not a clear answer, it only makes the style confusing.
Those are five of my pet peeves with AP Style. I’m sure I could come up with additional ones. In fact, that might eventually make another post.
