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.
Unapologetically surprising
|
If you’re reading this newsletter, you probably already understand the importance of word choice, especially in news coverage. Just last week we covered language surrounding abortion, for example. Choosing your words carefully when you're covering political or social topics often carries extra importance. But it’s not just these big “vocabulary words,” such as antiabortion or pro-abortion rights, that matter. Our friends at Trusting News, whom we’re partnering with to update our style guide this election season, have asked news consumers what signals indicate that a news story is unfair. The respondents often point to words that journalists might not give a second thought to, such as “surprising” or “unapologetic.” This might sound, well, surprising, but these words can convey a point of view or reflect a journalist’s assumptions. You might be turning people off, or polarizing your coverage, even as you’re trying to remain neutral. And with trust in news at a record low, every word counts, especially in an election year. So if you want to build your audience’s trust in your election coverage, or your coverage more generally, consider bookmarking this Trusting News resource and double-checking yourself when you use one of the words on the list. And now when you ask Stylebot about one of these words, we’ll share Trusting News’ advice with you. If you’d like to get advice like this in your newsroom’s Slack or Teams workspace this election season, reach out to us or see if you qualify for free access 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.
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...