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'Tis the (election) season
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Advance voting begins in some states this week, which means election season is fully underway. And yes, "election season" is a term we're recommending you use between now and election week. The reason? The expansion of both mail-in and in-person advance voting has changed norms around elections. And when things change, journalists often need to find new terms that accurately capture the situation. Word choice improves understanding and shifts people's expectations, and in this case, it can help ward off misinformation since the election process itself has become politicized. Journalists play a critical role in getting people accurate, actionable information about voting — and what comes after they cast their ballots. You can do a deep dive on this topic with this Election SOS resource. And you can get all of this advice and more directly in your newsroom's daily workflow by signing up with Stylebot for free through the Knight Election Hub. ❤ Team Stylebot
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Hone your writing skills and never use "hone in" again. Get writing tips, have fun with words and learn something new in a one-minute read each week by signing up for Stylebot’s newsletter.
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...