HUGE news in the online writing world! The AP Stylebook, one of the authorities for all things grammar/spelling related, has added 42 new guidelines for social media writing.
Some of the highlights: "Web site" has been converted to "website" (a move praised by Mashable), "smart phone" is now two words, and the hyphen in "e-reader" is here to stay.
The words "fan" and "friend" have blossomed out of their noun shells and become verbs. That's evolution.
Several acronyms have been christened by the AP Stylebook, my favorite being POS (parent over shoulder). Apparently, this is widely used by teens to warn against impending parental arrivals.
Some of the other newly standardized entries include: app, blog, click-through, unfriend (defriend is also acceptable, but less common), RSS, trending, widget, and wiki.
The Associated Press is also pretty open about why they made certain changes, go here to read about the motivation behind changing Web site to website, among other things. Even better, if you have usage questions of your own, you can post them on AP's Ask the Editor, and get your answer straight from the source!
Finally, in case anyone was wondering, "Internet" still needs to be capitalized, and the hyphen in "e-mail" isn't going anywhere. Oh well, at least we got website changed.
Have a good weekend WEbook!
--Brian
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Interesting! But, e-mail didn't get changed? Christ. And POS has always meant "piece-of-s@#t" to me, I wonder if that isn't going to cause some confusion.
"Sorry I can't read this POS"
Posted by: Scott K | June 08, 2010 at 02:32 PM
That's so wierd....but ok.
I do wish they had changed e-mail.
It's so annoying, that dash.
=)
Posted by: ReeVera | June 17, 2010 at 01:14 PM