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.
'Tis the (election) season
|
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
💌 A tip a weekIf someone forwarded you this email, subscribe here to get one writing tip a week in your inbox. 💬 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. 📝 About StylebotStylebot helps media professionals save time without sacrificing quality by answering editing questions on Slack, Microsoft Teams and Google Chrome. We're on a mission to make editing faster, easier and more fun ✨ Learn more about Stylebot or follow us Instagram, X or LinkedIn.
|
Stylebot
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.
There wasn't a full moon on Halloween, but you might have glimpsed one earlier this week. Either way, you don't capitalize "moon," or "sun," for that matter. That was the first of the errors in last week's quiz. Here's the sentence again: "The full Moon was the perfect compliment to their night of trick or treating." So how many did you spot? For most of you, it was three, the same number we counted. The other two were "compliment," which should be complement, and "trick or treating," which...
Happy Halloween! We definitely didn't scare you off with last week's quiz. In fact, more of you answered than usual, and more than half of you got it right: Here's how we would write the sentence: In this day and age, it's hard to tell whose data is secure. So we count three total errors that we put into two buckets: Contractions and possessive pronouns: Possessive pronouns can be tricky because we're so used to using apostrophes for possessives. But possessive pronouns (its, hers, theirs,...
Well, we failed to wreak havoc with last week's quiz 🙃 Despite the fact that the phrase is sometimes written as "wreck havoc," 80% of you got the right answer. "Wreck havoc" is an understandable mistake, because both "wreck" and "havoc" mean "destruction." But, using that logic with the verb "wreck," which means "to damage," "wreck havoc" means to damage destruction. "Wreak," meanwhile, means "to bring about," hence "wreak havoc." You didn't need the bonus points, but some of you replied to...