City Ledes -- Write With (AP) Style

Remember the last assignment, after which I blogged about when to use a dollar sign? This is what I pulled from your AP Stylebooks, under "dollars": "Use figures and the $ sign in all except casual references or amounts without a figure."

So, instead of writing $400,000, why did a few of you say, 400,000 dollars?

Yeah, I know the text had it the latter way. But unless it's inside of a quote, you should translate language to conform with AP style.

Same with numbers use. Some of you were all over the board in whether to write a number as a digit or a word. Here's the most basic AP guideline, in your style book under "numerals": In general "Spell out whole numbers below 10, use figures for 10 and above."

So two should be two, not 2. And 10 should be 10, not ten.

So then, is this correct, under AP Style rules?

. . . 52% of boys . . .

Yes and no. The number use is correct, but not the percentage symbol use. If you look under "percent," you find examples that show you should use the word, not the figure.

How about this for the start of a sentence?

Sixteen-year-old boys . . .

Actually, that IS correct number use. This is under the "numerals" heading:

Spell out a numeral at the beginning of a sentence.

Also, Is it 16 year-old girl or 16-year-old girl or 16 year old girl? AP Style under "ages": Use hyphens for ages expressed as adjectives before a noun or as substitutes for a noun.

So it's 16-year-old girl.

I know the AP Stylebook is a lot to digest. But as this class goes on, I expect that you improve by checking your word use against the AP Stylebook, and by remembering AP Style rules as we go along.

What I'm saying is, I don't expect you to make the same mistake twice. I expect you to learn from your mistakes and apply the lessons going forward.

When it comes to types of language you're likely to frequently -- like numbers and money references -- you may want to make a cheat sheet that you can quickly refer to. Just an idea, folks.