Monday, March 30, 2015

The view is better ahead of the pack

Advice for sportswriters in the AP Stylebook update that arrived in my inbox today, with applicability for writers of all kinds. A team losing a game is not a "disaster." Home runs are homers, not "dingers," "jacks" or "bombs." A player scored 10 straight points, not 10 "unanswered" points. If a football team scores two touchdowns and the opponent doesn't come back, say it "never trailed" rather than "never looked back." In short, avoid hackneyed words and phrases, redundancies and exaggerations. Or put another way, to thine own self be true, will ya?

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