Hello Stylebot subscribers, it's Laura, Stylebot's founder. Some of you already know me and Stylebot's origin story. But many of you don't, so here's a quick version: I started Stylebot for my students at the USC Annenberg School of Journalism because I wanted them to engage with our style guide and other foundational newsroom documents as part of their daily workflow. I've spent my whole career doing newsroom innovation, and I firmly believe that in order for journalism to survive, it must evolve. Stylebot is my contribution to that. It is about taking something that's fundamental to the profession and bringing it into the next era. That's why it's truly such an honor that Stylebot is a finalist in the Next Challenge for Media & Journalism, a competition that recognizes startups that are reinventing media and journalism. You got an email from us last week about voting for Stylebot to win the Public Choice Award, but we're reminding our subscribers that public voting will close May 19. So if you'd like to vote for Stylebot, please do it this week. It only takes a couple minutes, and you can get started here. Your support means the world to us. -Laura 💬 Get reliable, ethical writing advice at your fingertipsImproving your writing means making better choices every day. Stylebot makes it easy with our Slack, Teams and Google Chrome extensions. Try Stylebot for free today.
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One fun thing about writing is that it's both rule-based and flexible. So sometimes, there are no wrong answers. Such is the case with last week's quiz, when we asked you about the plural of octopus. Your choices were octopi (the plural that assumes a Latin origin of the word), octopodes (the proper plural for a word of Greek origin) and octopuses (the English way to pluralize it). Most of you picked "octopi," and exactly zero people chose "octopodes": No one got it wrong, and even if someone...
Today is the longest day of the year, and we can't write much more about it without revealing the answer to last week's quiz, so let's get right to it. The quiz was part vocabulary, part capitalization. We asked you to fill in the blank in this sentence: "They’re planning a party on the _______ to mark the longest day of the year." First, you had to recognize that the event marking the start of both summer and winter is a solstice, not an equinox, which marks the start of spring and fall....
Happy Friday...the 13th. Most of you got the right answer on last week's quiz. Just as you spell out one through nine and use numerals for 10 and higher, you do the same for ordinals. So this month we have Friday the 13th, and next month we'll have July Fourth. You got a peek at our Google Docs extension last week, and this week we're excited to share another great review: "Style Guide Checker is a great product that provides a second set of eyes to catch things that often go overlooked. Not...