AaronTurpen.com

When I began this blog, I wrote a sort of overview of the various types of writing and the differences between them.  One of those I mentioned was the Associated Press (AP) style.  It gets its name, of course, from the AP and is the basic presentation most journalistic writing uses.

Whole university courses are dedicated to teaching the AP style, but most of it can be congealed to a few hundred words.  After that, it’s a matter of practice to master it.  For me, this style of writing is a constant struggle – I have a tendency to ramble.

Every so often, the Associated Press releases a new edition of The Associated Press Stylebook, which began publication in 1977.  This contains the guidelines for writing in the AP style and is the handbook from which all of the aforementioned university courses and editors guide their teaching.

The Core of AP Style

Most of the style hinges on the general format and layout of your piece.  You may have heard of the Inverted Pyramid (pictured here) for conveying information.  That is the basis for nearly all of today’s news reporting.

In this method, all of the most important information for your article appears in the first couple of paragraphs.  The lead sentence for the article encapsulates the “why” for the reader to get engaged in the story while the first paragraph contains all of the pertinent “who, what, when, where, how” (the “Ws”).  The second and possibly third paragraph convey the rest of the pertinent facts and information to complete the Ws.

From that point on, the rest of the article is merely filling in the information to substantiate and explain the first couple of paragraphs.  It is important to remember two things that drive all news reporting: newsprint readers generally read the headline (title) and the first two to three paragraphs – about 200 words – of a story.  Few readers read beyond that point.  That, for the reporter, means that everything needs to be concisely crammed into the first couple of hundred words (or less).

This is the very core of the Associated Press style of writing.  It is the basic news reporting style that has been used, fundamentally, since journalism began.  For most writers, it is the hardest part of the AP style to master.

Other AP Style Considerations

The rest of the style considerations for AP news are mostly to guide standardizations for abbreviations, punctuation, and so forth.  Unless you’re writing for a syndicated AP-affiliated news outlet, however, these are less important than mastering the inverted pyramid.  They are, however, considered conventional for most journalism, even online, so they are worth a quick mention.

Numbers are probably the most-often confused aspect of the AP Style.  The rule is fairly simple, though: any number up to ten is spelled out (one, two, three, four, five.. nine), after that, use Arabics (10, 11, 12..).  The rest are detailed semantics.

Abbreviations are also often confusing to the writer.  Most of the abbreviations used in AP writing are nations, states, and so forth.  These require no explanation to the reader, so printing U.S. (never “US”) doesn’t need to be qualified before using the abbreviation.  So in the following, the two abbreviations are correct:

In the U.S., the Department of Transportation (DOT) is..

States, on the other hand, do not use the Postal Service two-letter abbreviation, but instead use the common shorthand abbreviation.  So Arizona becomes “Ariz.” and South Dakota becomes “S.D.”  States with one word names are abbreviated to three or four characters while states with two word names are abbreviated to two letters with periods between (and no spaces).

The rest of the style details are concerned with specifics such as how to handle dates, times, punctuation, and titles for both people and publications.  Much of this will likely be handled by the editor and copy layout people at the publication rather than the writer.  There are a lot of details here and they make up the majority of the AP’s Stylebook.

Related posts:

1. Writing for the Web
2. Writing About Writing – Types of Writing and Their Differences