Erin Brenner's Blog, page 7

AP Stylebook Partners with Merriam-Webster

Last week, I attended one of my favorite sessions of the conference year: the annual announcement of updates to the AP Stylebook. It’s held during the in-person conference of ACES: The Society for Editing, and it’s always full of changes, big and small. 

This year, the changes continued the trend of more precise, respectful language, giving a voice to the people being written about. There were also changes related to X/Twitter (yes, we’re going to have to accept that new name ), bullet lists,...

The Chicago Manual of Style: 18th Edition Updates

The Chicago Manual of Style (CMoS), one of the most-used style guides in publishing, is headed for an update to its 18th edition later this year and editors are eager to know what changes it will contain. Russell Harper, editor of CMoS, chatted with Mark Allen on That Word Chat, live at the ACES 2024 conference, giving us a glimpse at the changes coming.

Changes AnnouncedLocation will no longer be required in citations and bibliography entries.“Headline Style” will now be called “Tit...

Dealing With Formal and Descriptive Titles

Last week, I outlined some of the different rules for capping a composition title.

I noted that one wrinkle in applying sentence-style capitalization to the title of a book, poem, song, or other work of art was determining whether a person’s title was formal or descriptive. Formal titles are, in essence, proper nouns and are capped, both in the main text and in headlines and titles. Descriptive titles are common nouns and are lowercased.

So how do you distinguish a formal title from a desc...

Making Sense of Title Style Rules

One copyediting task that should be easy but can be a nightmare is how to capitalize the titles of works, such as books, magazines, articles, and songs—what The AP Stylebook refers to as “compositions.”

The task should be as simple as following a manuscript’s style guide, applying either sentence capitalization or headline capitalization.

But the task is not as simple as it seems, particularly for copyeditors who frequently work in more than one style.

Sentence Capitalization

Sentenc...