Sunday, July 21, 2013

Insert Title Here



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?

2 comments:

  1. 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?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. AP Style says this: "radar: a lowercase acronym for radio detection and ranging. Radar acceptable in all uses." Merriam-Webster agrees.

      Thanks for the info.

      Malia

      Delete

Thanks for reading my ramblings.