No matter if you climb the corporate ladder high
enough to get altitude sickness, The Associated Press (AP) Stylebook will only let
you capitalize your big, impressive title if it’s immediately BEFORE your name,
but not if it’s AFTER your name. As a copywriter who writes for all kinds of
companies, I can attest that Corporate America, Sole Proprietorship America,
LLC America and DBA America all have a real problem with this style guideline.
If you’ve lived at the office for upwards of 30
years, subsisting on PowerBars® and clawing your way to the top, you will never
accept AP Style’s insistence on writing your title this way: “Frank Morgan,
president of The Bank of Oz, joined the company as a mail room clerk.” When my copy
comes back with the “p” on president capitalized, I usually just rearrange the
sentence to read “Bank of Oz President Frank Morgan joined the company as a
mail room clerk,” which is OK (never use “okay”) with the AP for some reason I
have never figured out.
The same is true for those who sit in state houses,
rule Capitol Hill and run countries (note here the absence of the Oxford comma
because AP Style does not like it). Even President Barack Obama loses his
capital letter whenever a sentence reads “Barack Obama is the president.” Ditto
for the pope. AP Style dictates that you write, “Tens of thousands of Harley-Davidson
riders and their bikes descended on Rome to be blessed by Pope Francis, the
current pope." Titles in academia are treated in similar roughshod fashion, i.e.
“William Shakespeare, chairman of the English department, is the latest victim
of budget cuts.”
What about “board of directors,” instead of Board of
Directors? Yeah, that will definitely never fly, even
when pigs, possums and porcupines have wings. Am I right, writers?
Forwarded from R. Layland email: You may know this on okay – I think it was because the original was A-O-K in two way radio communication (it works out as high-low-high) as a way to acknowledge receiving the message even when there is noise in the transmission. The general public picked it up with the "a" in a-okay being dropped, and then people needed a way to write it. Could have been like radar and be written as ok but somewhere the k was spelled out. My guess is that they didn’t like the popular word. By the way should radar always be written as RADAR?
ReplyDeleteAP Style says this: "radar: a lowercase acronym for radio detection and ranging. Radar acceptable in all uses." Merriam-Webster agrees.
DeleteThanks for the info.
Malia